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. 

DEATH AND VIRUS – MADDOW FORCES US TO KEEP SEVERAL BALLS IN THE AIR

By Dominique Paul Noth

Nationally, our neck has long had a huge weight pressing down on it.  This feeling that “I can’t breathe” started months before George Floyd’s video death footage knocked the pandemic out of the top headline spot.  For days cities everywhere have exploded in unrest, with some violence-minded outside agitators on both the left and right stealing the public protests once the sun went down.

The news in this time frame should have been dominated by a potentially monumental and essential shift in presidents and not (since the nation has been slow to pay attention for 400 years)   the knee on the throat that the black community has been familiar with. 

Covid-19 – 100,000 deaths in the US in three months but probably much more  --   should still dominate international  attention and soon will again since too many states without flattening the virus curve are dealing with fumbled advice from the White House to reopen. 

The virus is the reason we all feel a death grip on our collective chest, particularly those in older years, those with underlying medical conditions and those crowded together in prisons or workplaces – and now we see how many young adults are also succumbing and how even some children under 5 have related symptoms despite the hope that the young recover better. 

Typically our imaginations try to humanize this invisible enemy, imagining it’s a him cackling like a demented Claude Rains in “The Invisible Man” as he flits among us, or hovering over our beds in a Nosferatu cloud waiting to swoop in and attack the droplets in our saliva.

A contrast in styles -- Madison protest to reopen state from coronavirus
 stay-home orders in April and (below) a Milwaukeee daytime march
downtown in the George Floyd case.

There is a horrible contrast here – polls indicate most Americans (84%) are still following social distancing, hand washing and even face masks despite Trump’s thrust to reopen whatever the cost.  Yet simultaneously the videos of people crowding into bars and pools make us think these thousands exist on an even more massive scale in a nation of 328 million people. Every TV moment of crowds packed in for protests or drinking confirms the fear.

We expect any day now to see the death tolls rise and the much expected second wave of the winter actually continue as a constantly rebooted first wave all the way into September.  It is a belief furthered by our realization of the imbeciles we’ve elected to high office – if we could do that to ourselves once, maybe we’re doing so again.

The summer death toll will continue but not, I anticipate, at the rate our worst dreams imagine, because the majority is struggling to follow the medical directives. Certainly some people are wearing face-coverings during Floyd protests to protect their identities, but look how universal remain the masks.  Anger may reduce the social distancing but clearly the virus is not far from the minds of protesters.  That won’t make the Floyd case the tipping point many pray for but it does suggest Americans can keep differing ideas in their heads at the same time.

So I am hopeful. Most governors will be forced to respond to spikes though Trump seems to have abandoned responsibility. 

Part of my brain remains uncertain, however, because the network and cable news largely have missed the boat, wasting hours in expected revelations from the corona virus task force assembled by the president but forced by his vagaries and ego to produce a mixed message of important medical advice suffocated in misleading rambling data about testing, spread, false drugs, the place of the economy in his thinking, where the tons of advertised help are actually going.   Of late, in his self-inflation flailing, he has suspended the task force press conferences and turned again to misdirection about thugs, Twitter rules and threats rather than realities.

As former president Obama pointed out, responding to a pandemic would challenge the abilities of the best of presidents.  We have the worst, yet our democratic niceties demand that we can only have one president at a time.  So while real words of comfort may be coming from Biden, he cannot insist on a contrary system to what the White House has wrapped itself in.  The pandemic has produced a presidential contest unlike any other, where we normally want explicit contrary visions of the future to dominate air time. The pandemic means we still have to hope the guy with the executive power to do things will grow up. All we can do is pray against realities that Trump may fumble through.

Rachel Maddow keeps our attention local
as well as national.

So how do we gain any sense of clarity in these circumstances?  So far I have only seen one famous anchor attempting that.  Until the Floyd explosion in dozens of cities, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was trying to split the nation’s attention in her nightly news show between the global pandemic and the steady but diverse deterioration state by state, nursing home by nursing home, prison by prison, meat packing plant by plant, doctor by doctor.  In many ways, this is the real human story of the president’s failure and where our nation must be paying attention to recover. It was a vivid reminder that the real purpose of the masks is to protect others. But it’s clearly not a ratings winner.

Spitting moments of anger and passion, Maddow was deliberately digging for what she saw week after week as the real story, not the ratings story.  She knows how to get ratings.  Her January interviews with Les Parnas – remember him? One of Giuliani’s Ukraine stooges that people hoped in vain would testify during the impeachment trial in the Senate, and does anyone remember that? – stole FOX and CNN’s thunder.  Her outlet’s coverage of that impeachment trial was also memorable for sticking with what happened, or should have happened.

Indeed take a moment to look back.  Trump’s ineptitude with the pandemic was hardly a surprise.  Viewers knew he was guilty and should be impeached by the Senate.  We also sensed the GOP senators knew it but refused to embrace the remedy.  The House’s eloquent lead prosecutor, Adam Schiff, bluntly warned Trump would do it again and by golly he has.  Recall what Schiff told us and the Senate, once they had absorbed his “overriding guilt.”

“History will not be kind to Donald Trump,” Schiff said in part. “If you find the House has proved its case and still vote to acquit, your name will be tied to his with a cord of steel and for all of history. Is there one among you who will say enough?” 

There wasn’t.

“Right matters here,” said Schiff. “So does decency. . .  He has betrayed our national security. And he will do so again. He has compromised out elections and he will do so again. You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. . . . I do not ask you to convict him because truth or right or decency  matters to him but  because  we have proven our case and truth matters to you ... You are decent, he is not and he is not who you are.”

Maybe not.  Maybe yes. We knew then and know now this was the only chance to be rid of him, little realizing in the earliest days of February that covid-19 had already broken through the doors and Trump’s feeble efforts were arriving far too late. Now we are forced to live through our failure and thousands of lives do hang in the balance. 

It’s one reason I responded to Maddow’s aggressive coverage.  (With one caveat.  Her insistence we pay attention to what local newspapers and media were showing us would have had even more value if local newspapers and media had remained strong and probative over the years, but time and again we see more clearly the stories they have missed.) 

Yet that is also a value of Maddow’s coverage.  The meat companies and prisons that won’t share numbers or respond to local Freedom of Information requests.  The confusion of local media and papers to echo the graphs and visuals that were already burying us at the national level.  They needed humanizing and she supplied.

By tracking regional and state coverage to the degree she did, she must have known that national ratings numbers would go to the “White House first” teams of other outlets. Yet she saw where the real story was, the humanity of local medical personnel, the suffering of relatives, the true weight on our chests of this pandemic.

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. 

DEMOCRATS SURVIVING IN THE REDDEST STATES

By Dominique Paul Noth

I didn’t write that headline.

It was provided me partly in jest by a high school mate in Oklahoma  I have not seen for 61 years, who went on to become a distinguished Oklahoma City lawyer and school board member and is now in the last month of his life because of cancer.

[Editor's Note: The subject  succumbed in June to cancer but his life story remains important. Ironically Trump has announced his first rally in a long time for Tulsa, Oklahoma,  June 20 even as covid deaths are on the rise.]

Horning circa 2015 on Oklahoma City school board

His name is Phil Horning and this is his story through my memory and some of his words.  He was the star  of my high school basketball team nobly labeled in sports pages of the time as “The Cubs of University High” though we were in fact the smallest high school in Norman, Oklahoma,  operating out of old barracks and a naval airport hanger built by the Seabees for  a World War II base, kept alive in case the need arose in the Korean War.

(It brings to mind an old George Gobel joke on the “Tonight Show” when the audience laughed because Gobel was a naval military flight instructor stationed in Oklahoma during WWII.  “You may laugh,” he told the audience, “but remember not a single Japanese plane made it past Tulsa.”)

We were actually the University of Oklahoma Laboratory School, which had great teachers and promising student teachers back in the days when this was uncommon.  As was our small class sizes. I recall a graduating class of  about 30, but I did get to take university level math and literature courses, no small feat back then.  Our school was a smattering of  kids associated with the university and from the town of Norman and the surrounding farms and ranches, so deliberately not designed as an elite academic program. There was a gigantic Norman High School for most of the town, but thanks mainly to Horning we were also a state basketball star – he had a wicked turn-around jump shot, and with a tall center and some good passers that was enough.

I was the manager of the team (meaning glorified ball boy) and we traveled by bus from town to town, sometimes to gyms so cramped that there was a mattress hung on the wall to cushion players doing layups.  Sometimes the rowdy opposing crowd for night games  gathered around our bus a bit threateningly, but we were undeterred.  It was a happy school environment despite the antiquated facilities – with marshes where we could conduct science experiments, real carpentry shops  and frogs we could catch for dissection.  We stood out in basketball and chess but lacked the numbers to do much else.  Phil’s exploits were such that his son, Clay, now a sportswriter, wrote them up in March 2020 in a column for the Norman Transcript, a paper I think I delivered as a kid in the 1950s. 

Horning circa 1958 in Norman Transcript
news story

In a warm email catching up on our past, Phil recalled how I would leap on a teacher’s table to enact a scene from Cyrano.  His memory is flattering.  I was the school nerd, I guess, popular because I performed as a folk singer and wrote for the school dittoed newsletter.  I loved to claim that if I hadn’t stopped growing at 5 feet 6 (I did shoot up to 5 feet 11 in senior year) I could have been a jock, but of course that’s nonsense. Phil was the BMOC, a great student and athlete who I recall deserving every bit of popularity he got. 

I never knew his politics then, and while I enjoyed my school, I was a transplanted liberal New Yorker deeply troubled by the political tones I heard around me.  Oklahoma was then and now a red state.   I remember the high school once held a debate for juniors and seniors on segregation vs. integration and I cheerfully took what to me as was the obvious winning side of integration. The school’s classes voted for segregation and it took me decades to get over that.

Phil is also a giant fan of my son-in-law, comedian Jim Gaffigan whose wife, my daughter, is his co-writer and they’re parents of five of our grandchildren.  I tried to arrange tickets for the Hornings years ago when Jim came through Oklahoma City, but the date didn’t work.  That was our only email contact until a mutual friend from long ago told me last month of his battle with stage four cancer.  In my email of reconnection, he was most flattering: “I remember so many details of our interactions in our youth," he wrote, "particularly I remember what a good brother you were to Jean.” Jean’s prime care giver today is our sister Malou.

I can write about this because Phil said I could and he is deeply humorous and philosophical about it all.  Look at this paragraph: “Given the fact that my expiration date is rolling closer, that I retired 17 years ago, I'm not really devastated about dying earlier than I planned (hoped.) If it comes to pass as predicted (three months), I will be very sad to leave my family when the world is in such a mess and the worst president of my lifetime is in office.”

Let’s think about that for a moment. First, you hear the disappointment with Trump everywhere and it has  become harder than ever to stick behind him, even in Oklahoma. Phil is theoretically surrounded by deep waves of red Trump supporters, but his viewpoints are no longer unique. 

He is placing a letter to the editor with a local newspaper – and since they have not yet replied I am cheerfully offering this space.  The main reason is not the attack on Trump.  It is to remind readers that a lot of the noble examples of the 20th century American man are being underappreciated by our 21st century sensibilities.  Sometimes the quiet, steady positive life of the Phil Hornings of our world should not pass unappreciated:

Letter to the editor:

First, a personal note:   I am a patriot. I have lived in central Oklahoma all my life and have lived under 14 presidents. If you have lived under more, you are at least 88.  Three times I have drawn checks from the federal government.  When I was a soldier, when I got my law degree on the G.I. Bill, and when I began to draw Social Security.  I have twice taken an oath to defend the Constitution, and I believe in the rule of law. I tell you these things hoping you will think about my thesis before piling on.

My thesis:  We are victims of the most incompetent president of my lifetime.  He is profoundly ignorant.   As conservative columnist George Will wrote, “What is most alarming is not that Trump has entered his eighth decade unscathed by even elementary knowledge about the nation’s history… Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.”

This flaw and others have led to the bungling and botching that is the federal response to the pandemic.   He turned down testing kits from the World Health Organization.  He spewed false statements.  On 1/22/20: “We have it totally under control.”  On 2/28/20 referring to Democrats, “This is their new hoax.”  Valuable time was lost.

Now, our health professionals are short on testing, masks, ventilators, and protective gear.
  
Our governors are trying to save lives while Trump is trying to save face.

--Phil Horning

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. 

TRUMP’S ONLY CHANCE FOR SALVATION IS STOPPING THE VOTE

By Dominique Paul Noth

For the last weeks, every day, America has suffered through the most maddening yet strangely essential White House briefings where some important facts and warnings about COVID-19 are dispensed directly from eminent health scientist but also prattled endlessly about in somnolence inducement by Vice President Mike Pence and anchored in constant misdirection by the portly ringmaster of this flea circus, who contradicts or calls into question the advice from his own gathered experts.

Trunp tries to stifle reporters at White House briefing.

Donald Trump, perhaps jealous about how personal, emotional and fascinating have been New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo briefings, determined not to let voters forget for a moment that whatever they think of Cuomo or the other governors he is the one in charge of the vital levers of government,  and confident in his ability to spin his own version of events,  has wandered this  White House meeting stage like a prowling gorilla ready to pounce, saving some important summaries for his own lips and using a parade of military men, CEO stooges and once capable bureaucrats, plus Jared Kushner, to fill in the gaps or in reality  take the blame for the mounting sense of failure and loss he doesn’t want to be associated with.

He also plays doctor, urging Americans to take an unproven chemical he has “good feelings about,” and contradicting the ventilator concerns of the nation’s governors, inadvertently revealing that, while most Americans know ventilators are the almost inevitable tool to keep them from death, Trump envisions going on ventilators as a sign you are beyond saving – so why encourage their use?

The next few days, he insists, will bring the peak of the infection wave and America can start getting back to normal while scientists see rolling peaks going on for months.  Sunday he actually called such a White House conference, though there was no news to speak of, simply to keep his rally-less presence going on TV, and jumping in to prevent Dr. Fauci from telling us what he really thinks about Trump’s drug of choice – hydroxychloroquine, which works for malaria and lupus but is unproven for COVID-19 and has as much chance to harm as to help.

By Monday and election Tuesday in Wisconsin, Trump’s hostility and arrogance at those briefings went beyond all reason, attacking any member of the press who questioned his statistics or past statements, defending his miracle cure even though it is unclear if it helps or hurts, sideswiping  any questioning of his experts on medical supply chains or desperate physicians. He then tried to turn the blame to Congress for not giving him more money without supervising strings.

This has dumfounded the so-called Trump supporters, who live in the regions or occupy the age levels most endangered by Trump’s behavior.

Even a sober research fellow at Marquette University couldn't help noticing that Trump's slight bump in poll ratings came nowhere  near the rise in popularity of other “wartime” presidents, though Trump uses that bump to further justify his behavior.

But what it all does demonstrate is his slow change in re-election strategy.  His “trump card,” of a stable economy will be long gone by November, so he is shifting to the “irreplaceable dictator” philosophy, that only he has enough control and authority of the system so the US has to keep him in office for another four years.  Every noise he makes these days is trying to bully the public into that viewpoint, including – have you noticed? – his attacks on voting by mail.

Of all the states, it is our Wisconsin that may be quietly showing him the way forward as long as conservative courts are in charge. Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers was too slow to pull the obvious trigger – delay the spring election -- perhaps because Trump was still holding out hope of an all clear by Easter. But when he did try to pull the election until June, the GOP legislature took him to conservative state high court, which insisted the election proceed.

Almost simultaneously, the US Supreme Court shot down an effort by a federal judge to allow ballots to count until April 13. SCOTUS ignored rampant evidence that the absentee ballot system was overloaded. As Justice Ginsburg said in a stern dissent: “Tens of thousands of absentee voters, unlikely to receive their ballots in time to cast them, will be left quite literally without a vote. This Court’s intervention is thus ill advised, especially so at this late hour.”

It seems to me the change in political reality runs far deeper this time than previous outrages from Trump’s lips.  This time everybody has family and friends in the danger zone for COVID while every day brings fresh stories of people outside the danger zone (except medical personnel regardless of age who are constantly in danger on the front lines) who are also dying – by the hundreds and thousands.  In Wisconsin, each day brings a story of a progressive voter who risked death to cast a ballot.

It is no accident that the country that prides itself on democracy is leading the death parade.

For him to view any of this as a personal victory, or to suggest that despite the evidence before our eyes none of this is his doing – well, everyone knows neither will fly. We can’t blame Trump for COVID-19 – any leader would have been challenged -- but we know clearly at this point that his prevarication, his destruction of previous pandemic response mechanisms, his inability to provide meaningful statistics despite the experts around him, his general incompetence all  suggest there are plenty of thing to blame him for at the polls. So his chances of winning an open election have disappeared despite the twitter harping of his diminishing fan base. They may still find him amusing but not to vote for.

His only hopes of survival are now not in the hands of voters – it depends on whether he can stop voting by mail or somehow get rid of the November election.  Wisconsin has just proved he can lean on the courts to do the undemocratic.  That’s the only way he can win.

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. 

AS AMERICA TURNED TO BIDEN, TRUMP TOOK COVER INSIDE A VIRUS

By Dominique Paul Noth

Just as America seemed to be turning to Joe Biden,
Trump tries to sound like COVID-19 expert.

Up until Trump, it had never been thought a weakness of our US Constitution that we can only have one president at a time.

The wish that this were not so crept into America’s majority thinking March 12 when the Democratic presidential race clarified and the final two contenders in separate events,  Joe Biden in prepared remarks on the coronavirus crisis and Bernie Sanders in typical off the cuff elbow-waving punctuation, delivered more presidential clarity than Trump had ever managed.

Up to then he had pretty much lied saying he had kept COVID-19 away by blocking travelers from China in February and assured everyone to just let the virus run its course and we would be back to good times in a matter of weeks.

That was followed on Sunday March 15 in a formal debate between the last two contenders where the winning choice for voters unveiled more of his softer, reasonable elder tone and Sanders provided a louder “me too” echo.  Since Bernie was still trying to knock Joe off, his hand gestures were in full force (delightfully illustrated in a newspaper story) and the debate verged into boring references to who had done what to whom 20 years ago.  Yet both still sounded more presidential as the virus clouds gathered -- and certainly clearer on the government’s relationship to its people in times of crisis. 

You could almost feel the mood of the watching public changing.

There was a pronounced desire to STOP LISTENING to that overweight comb-over on the corner TV endlessly pontificating on how great he is and assembling dutiful minions to echo his self-praise -- and turn instead to hear more ideas from the person likely to replace him and see how his lower-key approach and empathy about problem-solving rather than self-aggrandizement would work. Maybe he’s older than many would like, maybe a younger generation should be prepared to take over, but Biden is so obviously better and crisper that the nation was clearly moving to see him as the replacement.

Indeed the Biden camp itself is right now debating how to provide its own truth squad to combat Trump’s tendency to exaggerate what he has done and muddy where the US actually is. But be careful. Just as America in my estimation was prepared to make that mental shift to the president in waiting rather than the president in freefall, we were painfully reminded of the constitutional mandate. Our forced time with Trump is far from over and the real power of the president exists in the controls he still commands and the obedience that is his for the asking, right or wrong.

The social isolation demands of the coronavirus situation led Trump to abandon the frequent rallies that gave outlet for outrageous statements the media felt compelled to report. Gone as well are the impromptu diatribes against his enemies while boarding helicopters (where is he going to go now anyway?).

Yet just as the public was longing to see Trump get the comeuppance denied by the GOP in the impeachment trial – Bam! came down the invisible virus enemy and a crisis that demanded standing by the federal government and the only president we are allowed to have.

The crisis is so extreme that it pushed politics to the backburner.  Trump’s own wishy-washiness on COVID-19 helped him by extending our confusion. Now we need him to unleash the real power of the presidency – not to make  false claims of hoax, not the presidential declarations that had the weight of thimbles, not  the slow steady erosion of presidential planning and authority he had been demonstrating for three painful years and that Biden was primed to take on.  

Now we need the money his signature can help provide. Now we need a real president and have to settle for what is there in a genuine crisis.  And he was determined to keep himself in our minds over his rivals, assembling the real health scientists and his own obeisant cabinet to dominate the news cycle nightly, with press conferences where they crowded around him like nobles to the master – violating every edict of social distancing they talked of --  with actual edicts that had to be reported and the press again clamoring to hear him ramble.  

He  loomed  like a giant Pillsbury doughboy over even the intelligent warnings from health experts, hoping the public would transfer his bovine presence to a semblance of a steady hand --   and then imposing his own two-bit advice on the best drugs, shutting down any media who questioned Dr. Trump by immediately branding them as nasty and unfeeling for the American public.

Dr. Fauci trying to maintain decorum as Trump rambles

He is also forcing his minions to introduce every piece of news with “our beloved and great leader” intros.  To this point the scientists have tried to resist, dropping some gems of disagreement (Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Brix in particular) which tell the listening public more about what to do and what to fear.

It’s  become a  laughable exercise as VP Pence praises him and dispenses infomercial pitchman advice, as speaker after speaker crowd forward to clarify what the confusing policies meant, as Trump takes his bows and leaves the stage … and the TV cameras typically also depart until the next cycle. It has all led frankly to calls by multiple media reporters for the press to abandon covering these daily White House briefings because they are falsely elevating Trump.

Yet according to polls it was a clever intrusion, since the public has not yet separated how much Trump actually helps and how much he hinders.  It is  transparent to any student of history that his initial worry was his own re-election not the danger to the world and he thought he had an  ace up his sleeve to protect first – the economy.  It is now suffering a COVID-19 swoon into Great Depression territory.

All we’re going through cannot be blamed solely on Trump. His actual slowness to organize and act  may be only 25%  of our troubles --  but he  had disbanded many of the planning protections and field exercises Obama had put in pace and he’s played fast and loose with the truth since.  His behavior is far different than his proclamations yet  there is no one else given TV space to fabricate as he does.

I understand the wish to move to a new president well before a November election – I suspect most of the country feels the same but knows it is stuck with the jackass.  His self-description as a “wartime president” is another ploy to prevent  the US from swapping war horses in midstream.  But it does seem the voters have too quickly forgotten  we  had a chance in the impeachment trial to be rid of this president.  We and the Senate GOP didn’t and we are paying for that now, left with only the hope that he is not so far gone to prevent us from pulling  through.

I sympathize with those who want it to be different – who long for a nightly truth squad to follow the president around and provide common sense.  A good friend in California, a retired artist, is one of many on social media who bluntly and eloquently suggest that Biden should form a shadow government, one that daily contradicts and clarifies Trump’s ramblings  and supports the grains of sensibility in other orders.  “Please, don’t tell me it doesn’t have the force of law,” wrote the friend. “Of course it doesn’t. It has the force of morality and exigency.”

This friend and others have given the “shadow government” idea a lot of thought, working down to a vice presidential choice I agree with, a cabinet of proven public servants and many other truth tellers and experienced hands to restore the US to some sort of sanity in  internal politics and global repute. Meanwhile, the real Joe Biden is itching to speak out but is being advised by his insiders to temper his past blasts at Trump.  Like him or hate him, the nation needs Trump  to succeed for the sake of millions of US lives – plus he is all too eager to paint any opposition as “un-American.”

How do you attack a bad president in such circumstances?  You have to pick your shots and hope the voters understand, particularly with a president who will take constant bows dispensing nearly a trillion dollars in rescue money.

We are stuck with him for 10 more months  that are looking uglier and more dangerous every day.   But  the Constitution allows no shadow government to correct our course – any such effort could be disruptive.  So we have to watch and abide, hoping the current crop of voters are sensible enough to look past the mountebank, realize how we can’t much longer endure his deficits and remain eager to  look for some sanity in our future.

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.