EVERYTHING HOARY ABOUT TRUMP BECOMES NEW AGAIN

By Dominique Paul Noth

Partly his own foot-in-mouth, but also much to our national shame, there has been a flourishing publishing industry built around Donald Trump’s endless prattle and tabloid sordidness.

Mary Trump 

Now some old and shopworn gossip has gotten new enthusiasm in the public sphere because it comes from the inside, the tales from her childhood into her 50s by his only niece, Mary Trump, who is cannily introduced as a “trained clinical psychologist” to apparently give some depth to what are largely retreaded digs into the family dirt in “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”

Never forget this book, while leading national sales, is largely a rehash to veteran New Yorkers.  Three and a half years into his presidency, they remain amazed at how Trump ever fooled a sizable portion of the nation with the same behavior they had long grown tired of. How Trump talks about blacks and other minorities, how he treats workers and business partners, how he preens with self-aggrandizement – all that is old stuff on his home turf. 

That’s been much overlooked in the media coverage -- that the details in Mary Trump's book are already familiar fodder.  Virtually everyone in NY knew what a racist and PR tool Trump was and real thinkers had grown sick of it over decades.  The nation’s foolishness, encouraged by NBC’s pursuit toward the top of ratings by wallowing in the bottom of reality TV, turned Trump and his “Celebrity Apprentice” clown show into an elevation for much of the nation, while folks in Manhattan have known his blather inside out for generations.

Trump’s penchant for tabloid fame and plated fool’s gold had so long been a laughingstock in New York society that you can find published examples going back 40 years. He was only tolerated for his family’s money and the savagery with which he attacked those who attacked him. Savagery always delights the Manhattan press and public. He was long the media’s poster child for how arrogant belligerency can lead to tabloid reputation if you flash enough money on your way to bankruptcies and TV ratings.

While NYC residents thought they had his number, there was a whole misshapen mass of voters in the United States who could still fool themselves into seeing freshness in his tired tropes.

Waterston in 1975's "The Killing Fields"

While researching a story on actor Sam Waterston – long the famous prosecutor on the “Law and Order” series but with a longer reputation for stellar stage and film work, I stumbled on essays by a famous Pulitzer winning journalist, now deceased, the feisty stubborn Sydney Schanberg, central figure in the movie “The Killing Fields” (Waterston won an Oscar nomination for portraying him) and long known for speaking truth to power.  In fact, he cut his own close ties to the New York Times because his editors didn’t like it when he criticized their own coverage.

But before then, in 1983!, he had written a sarcastic piece for the New York Times about a Trump proposal to move the homeless into one of his buildings scheduled for demolition.

And then, on September 14th, 1987, now writing for Newsday, Schanberg provided an editorial anticipating by 30 plus years (!) the likelihood that the Trump brand, so scoffed in New York, might work for a while in national politics.  

Sydney Schanberg in 1980s

Entitled "Donald Trump -- Public-relations master" his prominent editorial  called Trump a "public-relations virtuoso," described an ongoing feud with then NY Mayor Ed Koch who Trump called a "moron" and "a jerk" (sound familiar?), provided numerous instances of Trump's claims of superior intellect ("It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles. I think I know most of it anyway."), and Schanberg then bluntly  warned,  "He can deny all he wants any designs on the White House, but Trump has the kind of instincts that are perfect for the age we live in -- the age of stage smoke and magic mirrors and imagery. In short, he sees the kind of men we admire and elect these days and he naturally asks: Why not me?"

 Schanberg ended the piece with, "In an age where smoke is everything, Donald Trump can blow it with the best of them."

I always thought “Celebrity Apprentice” was a ridiculous concept designed for morons and fully believed back in 2011 that most of America was laughing along with Barack Obama at the presidential press dinner where he poked fun at Donald deciding between Meatloaf and Gary Busey about who to better run a company.

Yet behold, the obnoxious high ratings crap that TV brought home to America seemed to make just enough people believe in an egotistical moron to elect him!

Today it is clear the public mood is finally done with Trump --  and yet … and yet. There still seem enough jerks around during the pandemic who think wearing a mask while shopping is some sort of attack on their constitutional rights, not some effort at saving the people around them.  Finally, now that children as well as adults are being put in harm’s way because of Trump’s egotistical behavior, the dawn is coming to people who once envisioned him as a salvation and are finally joining New  York City’s upper echelons in rejecting him. 

Yet the fear remains.  Maybe there are not enough people around still fascinated by his branding games but fear is powering voters this year who are ready to defy the virus if that’s what it takes to vote him out.  They are seriously worried about the damage Trump wants to do to mail-in voting and his attacks on the US Postal Service.

They are scared that he may send federal officers in camouflage to every city that doesn’t obey him (and most are hardly in a mood to obey) and believe he won’t follow normal democratic procedures once he loses. His mere existence at the top has done so much damage to our normal sense of human behavior and decency that the entire country is out of balance in how ferociously to put him down.  It’s turning us all  into mini-Trumps in how viciously we want him gone.

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.  

A COLD SLAP OF REALITY ABOUT COVID AND TRUMP'S ACCOUNTABILITY IN DEATH TOLL

By Dominique Paul Noth

I understand and even agree with not blaming Trump for everything.  Yes he is the symptom not the disease.  No, he’s not entirely to blame for the national gridlock. Yes, ousting him is only the first November step in the nation’s recovery.  It must be accompanied by wresting control from those deaf dumb and blind Republicans of the US Senate and retaining  Democratic control of the House (passing most of those 400 plus bills McConnell has blocked)  if we really expect President Biden to correct the damage.

Amusingly Biden has already said that on Day One he will make permanent DACA(Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and also on day one rejoin the World Health Organization that Trump in a moment of pandemic pique pulled the US out of.

But Biden is going to have one hell of a busy Day One given the clamor to fix health care, remove kids from border cages, put the economy back to work, help Congress fix immigration, rejoin the world on climate change, reclaim Obama’s environmental efforts, restore the rule of law, try to renew the Iran deal, return our global standing to normal and on and on in a numbing litany of damage to US reputation that Trump still has six full months to wreck even further.

But I do blame Trump first and foremost for the deaths he has caused in mishandling coronavirus – not something that he is just a symptom of.  He is the root cause. Unlike his claim that he could shoot a follower on Fifth Avenue and not be prosecuted (actually he would be), there are so many levers involved in his covid decisions that here he is getting away with murder.

His belligerent inaction has killed hundreds of people I know and tens upon tens of thousands I don’t personally know. There is no escaping that reality.

With the best of presidents we still would have lost thousands of our citizens – pandemics are not easy to deal with and knowledge of how covid-19 is acquired over time is proving essential to addressing it.  Failing to put knowledge first has proved quite horrifying.  Trump’s refusal to face up to the task is worse than any games of secrecy China played.  The fact that the US is painfully last in the world (next to a Brazilian Trump-like fool) is a direct consequence of his stopping and going, flunking basic messaging, in not trusting science over his own stupidity, in blocking sustained testing and research – yes, all that I blame him for.

His attitude that it is now up to the governors, not the federal government, is absurd if not criminal.  His delays and denials were not for the purpose of gaining knowledge – nor was the whip he used to run the taskforce -- or for admitting that we didn’t yet know enough, which is why scientists early on were uncertain about masks because they didn’t have evidence that the asymptomatic spread the disease.

Their uncertainties developing knowledge are explainable. His refusal to help develop that knowledge and then resist organized testing has now made the nation once regarded as the world’s strongest look the most confused and untrustworthy. More than likely now, another nation will develop the vaccine and let’s hope they are friendlier once Trump is gone.

Refrigerator trucks serving as temporary 
hospital morgue in New York City

We are now months if not years away from getting out of this.  In wasting six months we have jeopardized current and future generations.  We were so short of protective supplies that we demanded people not hoard them from first responders.  We limited testing and treatment to those that showed symptoms. Even today, despite the numbers Trump keeps touting, citizens cannot go out and get a test.  Nor are all of them exposed to the best treatments available because sometimes the doctors don’t yet know which are the best treatments.

We are only now starting to get a handle on the role of asymptomatic carriers, whether antibodies play a protective role, whether once negative turned positive can turn negative and then positive again.

We believe, mainly from other countries that have done better controlled tests -- and even these are not conclusive -- that elementary school children can suffer the virus and walk through it better than their teenage friends.  And we believe the teens do better than the college age students, who do better than the adults under 55.  So just as we are comforted – comforted! – that 50% of the deaths are people 60 to 80, we are learning that thousands of younger adults are even now increasing in  hospitalization  and dying and even teens and children are facing morbidity even when parents are doubtful if they have other underlying health issues.

A state like my Wisconsin stayed off the national radar until July 11 when it climbed into the record-setting daily positive covid rate alongside Texas, South Carolina, Alaska, Arkansas, North Carolina, Idaho, Oregon and Hawaii.

Simply put, the pandemic disaster in the US – not in the world -- is of epic proportions and we still know too little in the world’s most technologically advanced nation.  And that, no matter how you slice it, is Trump’s fault. After killing thousands, he is demanding putting thousands more at risk by insisting that all 13,000 public school districts reopen schools.

He has a secretary of education who sounds even stupider than he does when she goes on TV to say there is nothing dangerous for kids going to school.   Yet meanwhile the World Health Organization that Trump discounts has concluded that the virus is airborne in crowded indoor spaces with poor ventilation, which sure sounds to the New York Times like a description of many American schools

Nor do we know because of huge gaps in contact tracing and research how children become infected and how, if and when they transmit the virus.  Trying to re-open would seem to require just the sort of research and discussion that Trump opposes.

Yes, there is research from other countries that loosely suggest younger children are less likely than teenagers to infect other people, but from that point scientists are forced to guess why.  Could it be that elementary school children don’t have the lung capacity or the vocal strength to spray droplets as far as teenagers do?  In that case, you’d better stifle any budding Julie Andrews or Judy Garlands among your young ones and probably drown any future Brenda Lee.

Or could it be that,  unlike the 1918 pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands mainly young people, this virus doesn’t impact the younger as it has the older citizens with underlying   health conditions? Or, since we have never successfully developed a lasting vaccine from nasal covid infections, could it be that the covid-19 in its so far harmless mutations has another kick in the age breadbasket coming?

Scientists simply don’t have enough evidence to speak with certainty – and after six months of on again off again direction, whose fault is that?  Parents and school leaders are forced to take the gambles and make the decisions even as epidemiologists predict the fall could be even worse.  Who can blame the people for not expecting any sensible advice from Betsy DeVos or Trump?

I admit that I am a prime candidate to be felled quickly by the pandemic – in my seventies, with a Pacemaker and with lingering COPD even after I stopped smoking 15 years ago.   I don’t blame Trump for how the pandemic tossed out my pleasure of attending plays, films and concerts that I long enjoyed writing about – that departure was a common sense reality imposed by covid. As is my family's steps toward full quarantine.

But when I think of my grandchildren, and all the grandchildren, and how their future education and survival have been threatened by the actions of our current president, when I think of the 140,000 whose deaths he careless dismissed as the price of running a nation, I can’t wait for him to be gone.  There is no punishment that fits his crimes.

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. 

MPS SEEKS A REGIONAL EARTHQUAKE IN SOCIETY AND EDUCATION

By Dominique Paul Noth

It’s being treated by some as a utopian dream from the Milwaukee Public Schools’ controlling board. It is a unanimous resolution that, if adopted by southeastern Wisconsin,  would refocus the anger and marches over  George Floyd’s murder. It is a bold  effort to harness outrage among black, brown and white to address not just the Floyd circumstances but the complicated  core of our hardened societal attitudes, not just the momentary passions against racism  but real change, the sort that films and books are being written about but no one is yet sure can happen. 

More than a resolution to discuss things, it is a summons to regional arms. For many observers it is a sign of maturity at the once squabbling board -- sidetracked by small fights and petty disputes in the past –to   finally embrace reality and look far beyond themselves to produce a lasting change not only in how public schools are funded but in what they are supposed to be teaching.

“It’s hardly pie in the sky,” agreed several community organizers I spoke to. One reflected how it was just this sort of community engagement that solved the teen pregnancy problem that most of the community thought was so ingrained in Milwaukee society that it would never go away.  But a united effort – indeed a United Way effort – turned it around.

The solution to hyper-segregation in K-12, the MPS board now realizes aloud, must be regional -- not just within its own public school system but by motivating a regional army.

If the world is listening – and that means the WOW counties, plus Racine and Kenosha -- the board is flatly stating that it is not the police, not the justice system, not the elected officials alone but the whole massive infrastructure that must change.  The Floyd marches have to look hard and deep over decades to the actions and attitudes that created a muddy heritage about racism, housing patterns, meaningful jobs, economic status and social equity.

Addressing the re-emergence of hyper-segregation within our public schools is key to any lasting change. It requires an opening of black, brown and white minds that have created their own underlying tensions toward each other.

This has to be a massive assault, metro-wide and growing, by activists, community organizers and regional leaders on the built-in attitudes that have affected our children for generations and keep us in separate boxes.

These are mighty entrenched boxes that require discussion and action.  It’s far more than better police behavior.  It will require an empathy and admission of overlooked morality by the larger society itself.

When the Floyd marches took to Menomonee Falls.

The Milwaukee marches for Floyd that flooded downtown have spread out in June and July to Brookfield, Cudahy, Menomonee Falls and South Milwaukee, and the leaders report this emphasis will continue in the all-important suburbs and feeder communities. The new social awareness the Floyd case has generated was clearly much on the mind of the MPS leaders. So they are expanding the wake-up call in a belief that now is the time for the community to listen.  Not just in spite of the pandemic but in a curious way because of it.

There are some 13,000 public school districts in the nation, all trying to figure out how in the fall they can reopen for some days of in-person schooling and/or other days of distance learning.   Unlike coronavirus pandemics of the past, which seemed to target the younger, this brand of covid-19 has only slowly been spreading younger and right now dominates in the older  people with underlying health problems. That could change, even as we develop newer treatments and contact tracing knowledge.

 Right now, parents may mainly be thinking about how to get the kids out from underfoot, but is there a better time to examine what sort of society they will be trained to take their place in?  What are the schools going to teach them about those old-fashioned terms like history, civics and social trends?

The growing awareness of social injustice may be the appropriate time to address a changing vision of society that many surprisingly young children are already aware of. In fact, many of those children will balk at anything less meaningful as they go back to school.

The coronavirus virus on the one hand makes infinitely more complicated the case of racial justice, but it also has crystallized for young and old the importance of moving ahead more openly to true diversity, free of old conflicts.  

The board is not alone in wanting to see expansion into lasting change for the festering racial heritage. 

With its regional integration push, MPS is making an extraordinary effort to solve the core of Milwaukee's segregated realities.  It is using the excellent research of UWM’s retired professional expert in this field, Marc Levine, whom I have quoted in previous stories (including one on the Sherman Park uproar four years ago that anticipated many of the issues in the Floyd marches).

The MPS has assembled information not just on hyper-segregation in the classroom but on the complicated realities that make Milwaukee simultaneously top the list of segregated cities and the list of diversity of races within a city,  as Urban Milwaukee editor Bruce Murphy explored in a recent column.  This is the sort of complexity that our society must tackle before it can pretend to see solutions.

What MPS hasn’t openly admitted, though I am editorializing about it  here,  is that solutions also require changing the GOP stranglehold on the state legislature.  This is a basic political reality because, right now, only one of two major parties is invested in listening --  the Democrats.  That is a tragedy because solutions benefit  the state as a whole.

For years of writing about MPS problems, I've described piecemeal efforts by the MPS itself and its allies  to address religious schools and the voucher largesse,  the gross failure to tell the public how many of the tax  dollars were going to support religious schools (one of my highest read stories),  the slow steady stealing of state taxpayer money away from public education, the efforts by Milwaukee officials to slow the growth of religious schools in taking tax money, only to be undone by the state  legislature’s canny efforts to put on more screws.

What has made the problem doubly difficult, I wrote, is that the pawn is often black parents, who want their children to get religious-based education from the public schools and think the religious schools, through their clever funding scheme, are giving them taxpayer money for free – after decades of feeling ignored by the state largesse. All this is  built on the fiction that state dollars “must follow the children” though the parents are mere pass-throughs to religious institutions that regularly rely on their religious givers to add to the $740 per pupil the state now provides.

There are ironies and paradoxes in the role that integration plays in all this. In the 1950s everyone was pleased when the US Supreme Court in  Brown vs. Board recognized that separate but equal schools was not really  equal and caused a national and often divisive sequence of decisions  to integrate school systems.   One famous result was white flight from urban centers.  Another was the growth of religious and private schools getting taxpayer money from states. 

The upshot in so many places seems like two divergent  school systems subsidized by the taxpayer – public school districts, which in Wisconsin actually operates most charter schools, many successfully, and religious or private voucher schools, some of which are good while most  have motives other than  academics that keep them humming. Yet all in PR pamphlets describe themselves as “great schools” while public school districts struggle to survive on less money.  In  the city of Milwaukee, that means 70% of  attendance stems from minority families, too poor to finance the range of resources suburban schools enjoy.

This is just one irony reinforced in the new data sets the MPS resolution provides.  From 50-50 in racial segregation in the public classroom 70 years ago, then a big plummet and then several gains back toward the middle in the 1970s, the state voucher payments came along in the mid nineties – and that began a steady growing racial imbalance in the Milwaukee Public Schools, which became dominated by black students.  Only some of this  can be blamed on white flight and housing patterns, but some also stems from the legislature’s  deliberate efforts on behalf of religious and private schools. 

Peterson in a photo by his wife

As Bob Peterson, school board member and former leader of the teachers union, notes: “These data expose hyper-segregation in MetroMilwaukee schools. It's past the time to end the new Jim Crow in MetroMKE -- in schools and other areas of society.”

 Peterson should know. He is a force behind the resolution, has been intimately involved in public schools as teacher and union leader before service on the board.  His wife, photographer and author Barbara Miner, in 2013 wrote what stands on the most incisive book about  what happened in Milwaukee schools – “Lessons From the Heartland: A Turbulent Half-Century of Public Education in an Iconic American City.”

The board is pushing for  regionwide discussion, action and commitment not just from parents of schoolchildren but society on a whole.  Otherwise, many argue, movements like the Floyd marches are condemned to failure. 

Another reason why the MPS initiative is long overdue is how Wisconsin has become the GOP test tube for ignoring integration and in effect validating hyper-segregation.  For decades, the best corrective for education inequities was statewide integration and uniform funding – sensible in Mississippi, which has a lousy public school system, but it is equally lousy for blacks and whites who live in all counties.  Wisconsin may have 72 counties, but black and brown students are squeezed into a handful of urban counties, where the state funding disparities hit hardest.

This new MPS effort to rouse the regional community requires the black community to look at its own flaws at the same time as the activists are forcing the white community to examine its longer and more entrenched flaws -- the advantages of white privilege that white citizens have relied on both consciously and un. The lingering economic impact of this disparity has been slow to grab the conscience of white America, while black America has been open to economic come-ons (from mainly white right-wing money) they might not embrace so hard if our history had been different.

America has to look deeper than  the BLM T-shirts if it wants to truly address the chronic despair and real remedies for Wisconsin's African American communities. 

MPS is issuing that challenge, but it will be for nothing unless the larger community responds.   At a time when the coronavirus is forcing greater social distance, American must mentally move closer together on racial justice and  ingrown inequity.  Imagining that we can do this – well, that may be the biggest hurdle.

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.