Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post has an article this morning entitled, Trump Needs To Win The Election To Keep His ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ Card.  It speculates how Donald Trump’s tax returns highlight just how much he needs to stay in office to avoid possible prosecution and mountains of debt.

The New York Times’ detailing of two decades of President Donald Trump’s federal tax returns Sunday didn’t just expose how little Trump has paid in taxes. It also further exposed Trump’s personal stakes in November’s election, making it even clearer that the president sees a second term as a way to avoid potential prosecution and the burden of the mountainous debts he has amassed.

Trump’s tax returns and his refusal to release them have been the subject of political scrutiny since he decided to run for president in 2015. But they have caused him legal and financial problems for even longer: For the last decade, he has faced an Internal Revenue Service audit over a $72.9 million tax refund he claimed in 2010. 

The Times report raises questions about whether Trump violated federal law in evading taxes and offers a lens into why Trump has fought so hard to shield the returns from public view, legal and ethics experts said.

“Donald Trump’s financial records are the Rosetta Stone for understanding the depth of his corruption and crimes,” Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal attorney, said in a Monday interview with Yahoo News. “The more it is unraveled, the more he will unravel. It’s the reason he’s fought so hard to keep it under wraps.”

The Times report also raised the possibility that the IRS audit has been “paused” because Trump is president, suggesting that this case may not be resolved until his time in office concludes. 

The IRS did not respond to requests for comment about whether the audit had been temporarily halted. And there is no evidence that the president himself played any role in slowing it down if it indeed was put on pause. (Trump’s own appointee to head the IRS has disputed the assertion that he cannot release tax records because of the audit.) 

That it may have been paused, however, points to one of the clearest trends of the Trump presidency: his efforts to use his presidency to avoid legal scrutiny and prop himself up financially, as if his residence in the White House is his own personal “get out of jail free” card.

Citing legal opinions from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, Trump and his lawyers have repeatedly asserted that he cannot be prosecuted while he serves as president, a claim they argue shields him from scrutiny in federal, state and even civil litigation. In turn, he has so far escaped consequences for accusations of sexual assault, alleged defamation and questions about his finances.  

All of this gives the president tremendous incentive to remain in office.

The details of the returns the Times published Sunday are “consistent with what we’ve seen throughout the Trump presidency, which is that the president has taken every step possible to bend or break the law to serve his personal and financial interests,” said Donald Sherman, the deputy director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group.

“I think it confirms that he will likely continue to use the government, the tools of the government and his status as president to shield him from legal scrutiny,” he added.

Trump’s attorneys have routinely deployed that defense in cases involving the president’s tax returns, particularly in New York, where Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance has sought records similar to those the Times revealed on Sunday. 

Legal experts regard Trump’s defense as dubious, and in July, the Supreme Court twice rejected arguments that he was immune from congressional and legal subpoenas for financial records that could have forced him to release tax returns that may have revealed evidence of tax evasion and other illegal behavior.

Still, the court’s ruling made it unlikely that the documents would be turned over before the election. Vance’s subpoena, which requests eight years of Trump’s tax records, is still pending, thanks to an appeal from Trump. The ruling also forced congressional Democrats to return to lower courts to argue that their efforts to subpoena Trump’s tax returns met the legal test Chief Justice John Roberts outlined in the case.

Trump and his lawyers have deployed the immunity defense, too, in multiple defamation cases involving sexual assault allegations against the president: In May, the president’s attorneys argued that Summer Zervos, a woman who accused Trump of groping and kissing her, could not proceed with a defamation suit against the president because he is immune from prosecution while in office. 

And in September, Attorney General William Barr sought to intervene to protect Trump from a defamation suit brought by author E. Jean Carroll, who accused the president of raping her in the 1990s. The Justice Department argued it could do so because Trump was “acting within the scope” of the presidency when he called Carroll a liar ― the claim that prompted the defamation suit. The contention that Trump was acting in an official capacity may grant him immunity from a defamation claim.

The Supreme Court’s rejection of the argument that Trump is immune from investigative scrutiny simply because he is president was a setback for his legal team, said Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor who served as the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. 

But “because he controls the executive branch, he can use Bill Barr and the attorney general’s office to try to make sure that the federal government is not investigating, and he’s doing that,” Painter said. “As long as he’s in the presidency, he can ― I believe illegally ― keep the federal government from investigating him and his businesses by abusing his power and hoping the courts will back him up.”

Trump’s position also provides him with another entity to protect himself from scrutiny: his campaign arm. He has spent donations to his official campaign committee and the Republican National Committee on legal fees for himself, his adult children and his staff, as detailed by The New York Times. 

Campaign funds helped pay for lawyers for Trump family members and close associates when special counsel Robert Mueller’s grand jury summoned them for questioning in the Russia investigation. The campaign also paid the legal team that represented Trump during his impeachment trial in the Senate. Donor money has also paid lawyers to countersue former employees like Sam Nunberg, Cliff Sims, Omarosa Manigault Newman and Jessica Denson for allegedly breaching nondisclosure agreements.

Manigault Newman alleged in a 2018 tell-all book that the Trump campaign and RNC also paid former Trump associates to sign NDAs. She provided evidence that Lara Trump offered her $15,000 a month to work for the reelection campaign in exchange for signing an NDA covering her time in the White House. Other former Trump associates and family members paid by the campaign include Trump’s former bodyguard Keith Schiller, who has been paid $500,000 for unspecified consulting work. 

All of these payments help Trump by keeping him and his family from spending their own money on the legal expenses while silencing critics, both real and potential.

The Times report also revealed that Trump has amassed as much as $300 million in debt that is scheduled to come due over the next four years, suggesting that the president may struggle to meet his financial burdens in the near future unless he can remain in the White House. 

The tax returns obtained by the Times do not specify to whom Trump owes the money. But foreign creditors, in particular, are unlikely to call on a U.S. president who wields significant influence to repay loans immediately. Although Trump lists his creditors on required financial disclosures ― including Deutsche Bank, the large German financial institution ― that doesn’t tell the full story, Painter said: Trump’s debt raises significant concerns about whom he owes money to and what leverage they may have over the president. 

“He’s in a very precarious financial situation,” Painter said. “And we don’t know who the creditors really are. Because if Deutsche Bank makes a loan, you have no idea whether Deutsche Bank has the risk attached to that loan, or whether somebody else has made a commitment to Deutsche Bank to take on a piece of that, or all of it.”

That poses national security and other risks to the United States and also highlights the legal and financial uncertainty Trump and his web of businesses may face if he loses in November.

“When he’s not president anymore, we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Painter said. “And neither does he, so he wants to stay in order to continue to prop those businesses up. The minute he’s out, I think the loans could get called. And there could be a lot of investigations.”

The country needs Joe Biden to win!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

My colleague, David Podell, the President of Massachusetts Bay Community College, alerted me to President Trump’s banning of training programs including those on college campuses that he says promote racial or sexual “stereotyping” and “scapegoating.”

In a Twitter post on Tuesday, Trump said the ban, originally aimed at programs for government employees, was being extended to federal grantees and government contractors.

“Americans should be taught to take PRIDE in our Great Country, and if you don’t, there’s nothing in it for you!” he tweeted.

Diversity leaders say the executive order could have a chilling effect on efforts to improve campus racial climates.

In the executive order, Trump wrote that contracts can be refused or canceled if they don’t include an assurance that the recipients will avoid “workplace training that inculcates in its employees any form of race or sex stereotyping or any form of race or sex scapegoating.”

Experts interviewed by The Chronicle of Higher Education  said it was not clear whether colleges that received federal grants would have to halt programs that violate the executive order’s provisions or whether they would just be prohibited from using federal grants to pay for them.

The order states that “instructors and materials teaching that men and members of certain races, as well as our most venerable institutions, are inherently sexist and racist are appearing in workplace diversity trainings across the country, even in components of the federal government and among federal contractors.”

To obtain federal grants, recipients will have to state that they won’t use federal money to promote, among other things, ideas that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another,” that anyone “by virtue of his or her race or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive,” or that anyone “should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”

The executive order singles out higher education for programs that Trump finds objectionable. “Such ideas may be fashionable in the academy, but they have no place in programs and activities supported by federal taxpayer dollars,” it states. It goes on to contend that “research also suggests that blame-focused diversity training reinforces biases and decreases opportunities for minorities.”

Trump told agencies that dole out grants to identify which recipients violate the order, and directed the Department of Labor to set up a hotline to monitor complaints about such trainings.

As reported by The Chronicle, Shaun R. Harper, a professor of education and business at the University of Southern California, accused Trump of trying to create a distraction from the 200,000 lives he said had been lost due to the president’s mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis. Trump, he said, is also “firing up a base and further dividing the nation along racial and ideological lines.”

Harper, who founded and runs the USC Race and Equity Center, said he had no plans to change what his center does, but others might react differently.

“I’m afraid that institutional leaders and policy makers who didn’t want to do this stuff in the beginning — they were pushed and pressured by activists — will take an extremist view” in interpreting their training programs and assume they won’t pass federal muster, he said.

None of the programs Harper is aware of are “blame focused” or engage in stereotyping, he said. “I am pretty sure the Trump administration has no real idea of what actually happens in most of these programs. It’s reckless to engage in policy making without knowing what their substance and goal might be.”

Earlier this month, Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, notified federal agencies that Trump had learned that millions of taxpayer dollars had been spent “‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda.” He directed all government agencies to ferret out and cancel contracts related to training on “critical race theory” and “white privilege.”

The National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, which represents 1,100 members at 750 colleges and universities, released a statement this month decrying that ban. “At this time of racial reckoning with our past, the president deepens the divide and eliminates any possibility that individuals within the federal government can learn the consequences of racism and its deadly effects,” the group wrote. “Worse yet, it is a signal to our citizens and the world that racism does not exist and never existed. Eliminating these critical conversations on race is an erasure of history at a time when we need this understanding more than ever to transform our society into a just one.”

Eliminating these critical conversations on race is an erasure of history at a time when we need this understanding more than ever.

In an interview on Thursday the association’s president, Paulette Granberry Russell, said the vast majority of diversity officers would probably conclude that their programs didn’t violate any of the provisions about stereotyping or scapegoating that the order outlines. Therefore, she said, “it would be difficult to conclude that we should stop our workshops or training.”

She still worries, though, that the order could have a chilling effect on colleges’ diversity training since it will be subject to interpretation by federal agencies that dole out grants.

In an interview with The Chronicle, two top diversity officers said recently that their work had never been more important or exhausting, given the national reckoning on race.

Tuesday’s executive order invoked the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the words of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. to argue that instead of treating everyone as equals, supporters of diversity training are pushing an ideology that says “that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.”

The Association of American Medical Colleges also weighed in on Thursday, saying it was “concerned and alarmed” by the executive order. “While the executive order contains some elements that are universally agreed upon and with which we agree, it also exhibits a misunderstanding of most diversity- and inclusion-training programs and therefore will only further divide an already fragmented nation,” the group said.

The health-care disparities exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic and protests against police brutality have demonstrated that the country hasn’t always lived up to its ideals of racial equity, the association said. “Only through better understanding of our conscious and unconscious biases, learning about other cultures in our pluralistic society, reaffirming our commitment to being anti-racist, and challenging long-held beliefs — that we hold ourselves and that we hold about others — will we heal the divisions now shaking our nation to its core.”

Trump is not interested in healing only destroying.

Tony

Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times expose that Donald Trump has avoided paying any federal income tax in 11 of the past 20 years reminds me of another New York real estate magnate, Leona Helmsley whose nickname, “the Queen of Mean” was a reference to her famous quote “only the little people pay taxes.”  In case you are too young to remember her, here is a quick bio.

Leona Helmsley, the “Queen of Mean” whose legendary cruelty towards her employees and disdain for “little people” was  the unacceptable face of New York high society in the 1980s.

Her summer house, Dunnellen Hall, in Connecticut, played a central role in her very public downfall in 1989 when she was found guilty of tax evasion and forced to serve 18 months in jail.

It was a housekeeper at the hall who revealed in the course of the trial the phrase that was to hang over the hotel magnate for the rest of her life: “We don’t pay taxes,” the housekeeper said her employer once told her. “Only the little people pay taxes.”

How Helmsley, alongside her husband, Harry, came to form an empire worth billions – including the Empire State Building, the Park Lane Hotel and a 100-seat private jet with bedroom attached – only to be brought as low as a New York prison cell ranks alongside that of Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko as one of the defining stories of the money-making 80s.

One moment she was being lauded in glossy magazines and New York salons as an unparalleled businesswoman, philanthropist and hostess of exotic Manhattan parties; the next people were lining up to lament her excesses.

Ed Koch, the city’s then mayor, called her the Wicked Witch of the West. A later mayor rose to prominence as one of her prosecutors: Rudy Giuliani. Her own lawyer, defending her during the 1989 trial portrayed her to the jury as a “tough bitch” and when the judge came to hand out sentence he said her conduct had been the “product of naked greed. You persisted in the arrogant belief that you were above the law.”

She earned the hostility of contractors she brought in to work on the $3m refurbishment of Dunnellen Hall that the couple bought in 1983. She refused to pay several, including one builder from whom she withheld $88,000 in fees on the grounds that he owed her $800,000 in “commissions” for work he had carried out on Helmsley hotels.

Several contractors are reputed to have begun the process that would end with Helmsley in jail by sending the New York Post details of how she used them to pass off the refurbishment of her private dwelling as tax-exempt business costs.

Her treatment of individual employees also cost her dear, as formerly terrified men and women queued up around the courthouse to testify against her. The jury heard how employees set up an alarm system that rang whenever she had left her home and was heading for one of her hotels.

Where Leona was “the queen of mean”  – let’s dub Trump the “don of con.” 

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has obtained tax-return data for President Trump and his companies that covers more than two decades. Mr. Trump has long refused to release this information, making him the first president in decades to hide basic details about his finances. His refusal has made his tax returns among the most sought-after documents in recent memory.

Among the key findings of The Times’s investigation:

• Mr. Trump paid no federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years that The Times examined. In 2017, after he became president, his tax bill was only $750.
• He has reduced his tax bill with questionable measures, including a $72.9 million tax refund that is the subject of an audit by the Internal Revenue Service.
• Many of his signature businesses, including his golf courses, report losing large amounts of money — losses that have helped him to lower his taxes.
• The financial pressure on him is increasing as hundreds of millions of dollars in loans he personally guaranteed are soon coming due.
• Even while declaring losses, he has managed to enjoy a lavish lifestyle by taking tax deductions on what most people would consider personal expenses, including residences, aircraft and $70,000 in hairstyling for television.
• Ivanka Trump, while working as an employee of the Trump Organization, appears to have received “consulting fees” that also helped reduce the family’s tax bill.
• As president, he has received more money from foreign sources and U.S. interest groups than previously known. The records do not reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.

It is important to remember that the returns are not an unvarnished look at Mr. Trump’s business activity. They are instead his own portrayal of his companies, compiled for the I.R.S. But they do offer the most detailed picture yet available.

Trump’s income tax information will be as important an issue as the coronavirus pandemic and Supreme Court nominee Amy Comey Barrett going into the presidential election.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Many Americans will be watching the first debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden on Tuesday night.  A major challenge for Biden is how to debate someone who habitually lies.  Richard A. Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical College, has advice for Biden in an article in the New York Times.

The main takeaways from Friedman are:

• Don’t waste your time fact-checking the president. If you attempt to counter every falsehood or distortion that Mr. Trump serves up, you will cede control of the debate. And, by trying to correct him, you will paradoxically strengthen the misinformation rather than undermine it. (Research shows that trying to correct a falsehood with truth can backfire by reinforcing the original lie. ) Instead, Mr. Biden should use more powerful weapons that will put Mr. Trump on the defensive — and also tell the audience that the president is a dishonest narrator.
• The first weapon maybe the most effective: humor and ridicule. A derisive joke can defuse tense and outrageous situations. In 2007, for example, protesters dressed as clowns confronted a “white power” march in Charlotte, N.C., holding signs that read “wife power” and throwing white flour in the air. It made the white nationalists look ridiculous and avoided a violent confrontation, which would have served the interests of the racists.
• To see why humor could be so effective in dealing with Mr. Trump, you have to understand why he lies. People don’t tell the truth for many reasons, but the president’s lies generally fall into two categories. The first are boastful and self-aggrandizing claims, such as “Only I can fix it. ” This swagger betrays a fragile self-esteem, and while outlandish and amusing, the lies are typically harmless. The second type of lie aims to deceive others in pursuit of a specific goal. For example, we now know, from a taped interview with Bob Woodward, that Mr. Trump knew in February that the coronavirus was deadly and transmissible by air, but he lied to the public, playing down its severity and discouraging the use of masks — a calculated deception that cost untold lives. This kind of lie is emblematic of individuals with antisocial traits who have a deficit in moral conscience. But if they also have strong narcissistic traits, they are exquisitely sensitive to criticism and especially to ridicule. Derisive humor threatens to expose them for the loser they secretly believe they are.

The entire article is below.  It is good advice!

Tony

New York Times

How to Debate Someone Who Lies?

By Richard A. Friedman

Sept. 25, 2020

When Joe Biden debates President Trump on Tuesday, he will have to figure out how to parry with an opponent who habitually lies and doesn’t play by the rules.

As a psychiatrist, I’d like to offer Mr. Biden some advice: Don’t waste your time fact-checking the president. If you attempt to counter every falsehood or distortion that Mr. Trump serves up, you will cede control of the debate. And, by trying to correct him, you will paradoxically strengthen the misinformation rather than undermine it. (Research shows that trying to correct a falsehood with truth can backfire by reinforcing the original lie. )

Instead, Mr. Biden should use more powerful weapons that will put Mr. Trump on the defensive — and also tell the audience that the president is a dishonest narrator.

The first weapon maybe the most effective: humor and ridicule. A derisive joke can defuse tense and outrageous situations. In 2007, for example, protesters dressed as clowns confronted a “white power” march in Charlotte, N.C., holding signs that read “wife power” and throwing white flour in the air. It made the white nationalists look ridiculous and avoided a violent confrontation, which would have served the interests of the racists.

Now, imagine a different kind of high-stakes situation — the presidential debate. Mr. Trump, faced with a pandemic and an economic downturn, tells Americans what a great job he’s done. In response, Mr. Biden should smile and say with a bit of laugh: “And just where have you been living? South Korea? Or Fiji? You cannot be in the United States — except maybe on the golf course. We’ve got about 4 percent of the world’s population and 21 percent of all Covid deaths and the highest unemployment since the Great Depression! You must be living on another planet!”

The retort mocks the president as weak and unaccomplished, which will rattle him. He is apparently so fearful of being the target of a joke that — unlike any president before him — he has skipped the last three roasts at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Ridicule could also neutralize one of Mr. Trump’s favorite racist tropes: that America is being overtaken by violent thugs. So what should Mr. Biden do when the president starts in? He should say something like, “This is like the bad joke about the arsonist who shows up at the bonfire and started posing as a fireman! The guy who calls himself a stable genius seems to have forgotten that he’s been president during all this violence and that he’s been the instigator in chief with his racist rhetoric. The country’s biggest bully thinks he can fool you by playing sheriff.”

To see why humor could be so effective in dealing with Mr. Trump, you have to understand why he lies. People don’t tell the truth for many reasons, but the president’s lies generally fall into two categories. The first are boastful and self-aggrandizing claims, such as “Only I can fix it. ” This swagger betrays a fragile self-esteem, and while outlandish and amusing, the lies are typically harmless.

The second type of lie aims to deceive others in pursuit of a specific goal. For example, we now know, from a taped interview with Bob Woodward, that Mr. Trump knew in February that the coronavirus was deadly and transmissible by air, but he lied to the public, playing down its severity and discouraging the use of masks — a calculated deception that cost untold lives.

This kind of lie is emblematic of individuals with antisocial traits who have a deficit in moral conscience. But if they also have strong narcissistic traits, they are exquisitely sensitive to criticism and especially to ridicule. Derisive humor threatens to expose them for the loser they secretly believe they are.

Some of the president’s lies are not served by humor; Mr. Biden will have to confront them head-on, like the president’s disastrous handling of the pandemic. In this case, the best strategy would be to say: “The fact is that more than 200,000 American have died — even if the president falsely suggests that the number is lower. But let’s focus on the grim truth: More than 200,000 of our loved ones died from coronavirus, many because of the president’s deception.”

The cognitive scientist George Lakoff, who studies propaganda, calls this a “truth sandwich” — a lie gets sandwiched between true statements. Research shows it effectively corrects a falsehood, because people tend to remember the beginning and end of a statement, rather than what’s in the middle.

Mr. Trump’s resistance to masks is also a target for a derisive truth sandwich: “Wearing a mask is one of the most effective ways to prevent the spread of coronavirus. But you sure wouldn’t know it from the president, who has run around in public without one and mocks people like me who wear them. Is it vanity or that he just doesn’t believe in science? I don’t know, but the science is undisputed: wearing masks saves lives.”

Mr. Biden will have another advantage during the debate: President Trump will not have a live audience to excite him and satisfy his insatiable need for approval and attention, which means he will be even more vulnerable to a takedown. True, no one will be there to laugh at Mr. Biden’s jokes, but it doesn’t matter because the goal is serious: to expose the truth and unnerve Mr. Trump by getting under his skin.

Amy Barrett Ginsberg

Dear Commons Community,

Lara Bazelon, a law professor at the University of San Francisco, has an op-ed in today’s New York Times reviewing President Trump’s nominee to the US Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett. Entitled, Amy Coney Barrett Is No Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Bazelon comments: 

“Judge Barrett, who is on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, has impeccable intellectual credentials — and a record that stands in stark contrast to Justice Ginsburg’s. She has written that abortion is “always immoral,” and joined two dissents against decisions supporting the right to choose.”

Bazelon likens Barrett’s nomination to Justice Clarence Thomas who replaced Thurgood Marshall and who “has become famous for his hostility to civil rights; affirmative action; and most of the claims raised by criminal defendants, who are disproportionately people of color.”

Bazelon concludes:  “Make no mistake: Judge Barrett’s confirmation will be the wrecking ball that finally smashes Roe v. Wade and undoes the Affordable Care Act. Her crucial vote on these cases and so many others will undo decades of the progress that Justice Ginsburg worked her whole life to achieve.”

The entire op-ed is below.

Tony

————————————————————

New York Times

Amy Coney Barrett Is No Ruth Bader Ginsburg

By Lara Bazelon

Sept. 26, 2020

President Trump’s promise to name a woman to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Sept. 18 at 87, was cynical and insulting to the millions of women who view the late Supreme Court justice as a feminist icon. Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, praised the decision as a “powerful positive statement” to young women, who would embrace the president’s nominee as a “role model.” The message to women is clear: Nothing to see here, ladies! One of you is as good as any other.

But Mr. Trump’s pick, Amy Coney Barrett, is no Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Women aren’t gym socks, purchased in bulk so that a replacement can be seamlessly substituted into the rotation when one goes missing in the washing machine. The next Supreme Court justice will cast crucial votes that affect women’s fundamental rights, including the right to control their own bodies and to gain access to affordable health care for themselves and their families. The fact that President Trump’s nominee is a woman matters less if she does not support the causes at the heart of the long, continuing march for gender equality that Justice Ginsburg championed.

The Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, has also vowed to pick a Black woman as his first nominee to the Supreme Court. But he’s not going to gaslight us by choosing someone who will share the judicial philosophy of the court’s conservative wing, just as no one believed that Mr. Biden’s vice-presidential pick — whom he also promised would be female — would be a Republican who repudiated every plank of his platform. (Indeed, Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris — fairly or not — has been denounced by the Trump campaign as the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate.)

Judge Barrett, who is on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, has impeccable intellectual credentials — and a record that stands in stark contrast to Justice Ginsburg’s. She has written that abortion is “always immoral,” and joined two dissents against decisions supporting the right to choose. One decision stopped the enforcement of a state law that would have required a minor — regardless of her maturity or family situation — to notify her parents of her decision to have an abortion, giving them veto power, unless a judge found this was not in her best interests.

Another decision struck down a state law banning abortions at any stage of pregnancy based on fetal disabilities, including those that were life-threatening. (The law also banned abortions based on race, ethnicity and gender.) Judge Barrett dissented from a ruling banning people with felony convictions from possessing firearms, and publicly criticized Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. for voting with the high court’s liberal bloc to uphold the Affordable Care Act, saying he pushed the statute “beyond its plausible meaning” to save it.

Make no mistake: Judge Barrett’s confirmation will be the wrecking ball that finally smashes Roe v. Wade and undoes the Affordable Care Act. Her crucial vote on these cases and so many others will undo decades of the progress that Justice Ginsburg worked her whole life to achieve.

Justice Ginsburg’s most important legacy is that she was a forward-thinking, canny and unabashed feminist. Beginning in the 1970s, as a co-founder of the A.C.L.U.’s Women’s Rights Project, she argued six sex-discrimination cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and won five. In several of them, she sought to invalidate laws that barred men from taking advantage of certain benefits, driving home the point — to an all-male court — that unequal treatment hurts everyone equally.

She built on that work as a justice. In 2016, she called out Texas’ claim that a law sharply curtailing women’s access to abortion was actually safeguarding women’s health as “beyond rational belief.” (The court struck down the law 5-4.) Justice Ginsburg was known as much for the power of her dissents as for the majority opinions she wrote. When the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that a female supervisor at a tire company had waited too long to sue her employer for paying her less than her male colleagues, Justice Ginsburg noted that the secrecy shrouding employee compensation made a timely filing impossible and urged Congress to act. Congress did, and in 2009 President Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which did away with stringent and unrealistic time requirements.

Republicans would have us believe that ramming through Justice Ginsburg’s replacement less than two months before the election — and after denying President Obama, who had 11 months left in his second term, the chance to replace Justice Antonin Scalia — is fine and dandy because, well, the new justice is a woman. When it comes to the Supreme Court, we’ve been to this identity politics movie before, and we know how it ends.

In 1991, President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, a federal appellate judge, to replace Thurgood Marshall, a civil rights warrior who had argued Brown v. Board of Education and then as a justice had written many decisions expanding civil rights and criminal justice protections for racial minorities. (Justice Ginsburg was known as the “Thurgood Marshall of gender equality law.”) Republicans predicted, correctly, that Democrats would find themselves in a difficult position because, like Justice Marshall, the nominee was Black.

Although nothing about Judge Thomas’s career and judicial record suggested he would be anything like Justice Marshall, and though he faced credible allegations of sexual harassment from Anita Hill, he was confirmed 52 to 48, after accusing Democrats of orchestrating a “high-tech lynching.” (In another twist, many blame Mr. Biden — then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee — for his bungling of the confirmation hearing and his poor treatment of Ms. Hill.) In his decades on the court, Justice Thomas has become famous for his hostility to civil rights; affirmative action; and most of the claims raised by criminal defendants, who are disproportionately people of color.

On her deathbed, Justice Ginsburg wrote that her “most fervent wish” was that a new justice would not be installed until after the election. It is a cold calculation by the president, a master misogynist, that the nomination of a woman, in and of itself, would be enough to soften any opposition to the ugliness of a rushed, hypocritical and nakedly political charade. Think again Mr. President: We aren’t stupid.

School Daze

Dear Commons Community,

Stephan Brumberg, a colleague of mine from CUNY, was interviewed on a podcast for faq.nyc.   The podcast contrasts early 20th century  New York City schools with today’s including how policy makers dealt with major issues such as pandemics.

I found it a most illuminating and fun visit to the past.

Thank you, Stephan!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As someone who follows national news and politics, it was only natural that I would read Bob Woodward’s Rage, his most recent book reporting on Donald Trump and his presidency.  According to the publisher, Simon & Schuster, it sold over 600,000 copies in its first week. The book is carefully researched and cited throughout and includes material based on seventeen interviews with Donald Trump himself.  Why Trump would give these interviews is beyond me.  

I found the 450-page book including footnotes a quick read.  I knew many of the stories in its chapters but Woodward fills in gaps in my knowledge and most of the time they are based on revealed primary sources.  There were many enlightening takeaways (below is a an article that comments on five takeaways from Rage) especially related to coronavirus, Trump’s relationships with several of his appointees including James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, and Dan Coats, and exchanges with Jared Kushner. 

I agree fully with a New York Times review that concludes:

“Woodward ends Rage by delivering his grave verdict. “When his performance as president is taken in its entirety. I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.”

Amen!

Tony

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New York Times

5 Takeaways From ‘Rage,’ Bob Woodward’s New Book About Trump

By Aishvarya Kavi

Sept. 9, 2020

“This is deadly stuff,” President Trump said of the coronavirus in a Feb. 7 interview with the journalist Bob Woodward for his upcoming book, “Rage.” But it was a vastly different story than he was telling the public at the time. Mr. Trump would later admit to Mr. Woodward that publicly, he “wanted to always” play down the severity of the virus.

Mr. Woodward conducted 18 interviews with the president for the book, which goes on sale next week. Mr. Trump also granted Mr. Woodward access to top officials inside the White House, revealing the inner workings of the president and his administration.

Here are five takeaways.

Mr. Trump minimized the risks of the coronavirus to the American public early in the year.

Despite knowing that the virus was “deadly” and highly contagious, he often publicly said the opposite, insisting that the virus would go away quickly.

“I wanted to always play it down,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Woodward on March 19. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

And while he was saying publicly that children were “almost immune” to the virus, he told Mr. Woodward in March: “Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old, older. Young people too — plenty of young people.”

In April, as he began to urge the country to reopen, Mr. Trump told Mr. Woodward of the virus, “It’s so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t even believe it.”

Two of the president’s top officials thought he was “dangerous” and considered speaking out publicly.

Gen. Jim Mattis, Mr. Trump’s former defense secretary, is quoted describing Mr. Trump as “dangerous” and “unfit” for the presidency in a conversation with Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence at the time. Mr. Coats himself was haunted by the president’s Twitter feed and believed that Mr. Trump’s gentle approach to Russia reflected something more sinister, perhaps that Moscow had “something” on the president.

“Maybe at some point we’re going to have to stand up and speak out,” Mr. Mattis told Mr. Coats in May 2019, according to the book. “There may be a time when we have to take collective action.”

Ultimately neither official spoke out.

Mr. Trump repeatedly denigrated the U.S. military and his top generals.

Mr. Woodward quoted Mr. Trump denigrating senior American military officials to his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, during a 2017 meeting.

“They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals,” the president said.

And in a discussion with Mr. Woodward, Mr. Trump called the U.S. military “suckers” for paying extensive costs to protect South Korea. Mr. Woodward wrote that he was stunned when the president said of South Korea, “We’re defending you, we’re allowing you to exist.”

Mr. Woodward also reports that Mr. Trump chewed out Mr. Coats after a briefing with reporters about the threat that Russia presented to the nation’s elections systems. Mr. Coats had gone further than he and the president had discussed beforehand.

When asked about the pain “Black people feel in this country,” Mr. Trump was unable to express empathy.

Mr. Woodward pointed out that both he and Mr. Trump were “white, privileged” and asked if Mr. Trump was working to “understand the anger and the pain, particularly, Black people feel in this country.”

Mr. Trump replied, “No,” and added: “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.”

Mr. Woodward writes that he tried to coax the president into speaking about his understanding of race. But Mr. Trump would only say over and over that the economy had been positive for Black people before the coronavirus led to an economic crisis.

Mr. Woodward gained insight into Mr. Trump’s relationships with the leaders of North Korea and Russia.

Mr. Trump provided Mr. Woodward with the details of letters between himself and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, in which the two men fawn over each other. Mr. Kim wrote in one letter that their relationship was like a “fantasy film.”

In describing his chemistry with Mr. Kim, Mr. Trump said: “You meet a woman. In one second, you know whether or not it’s going to happen.”

Mr. Trump also complained about the various investigations into ties between his campaign and Russia, saying that they were affecting his abilities as president and his relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

“Putin said to me in a meeting, he said, it’s a shame, because I know it’s very hard for you to make a deal with us. I said, you’re right,” Mr. Trump said.

Dear Commons Community,

The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center published a report yesterday indicating that preliminary enrollments among all undergraduate higher education sectors decreased 2.5 percent.  Graduate student enrollment increased 3.9 percent.  Overall postsecondary enrollment is down 1.8 percent.  Among the various sectors, public community colleges have experienced the largest declines at 7.5 percent. 

The Center’s enrollment results are based on 3.6 million students at 629 colleges, nearly 22 percent of the institutions that report to the organization.

“The picture will become clearer as more data comes in, but at this point the large equity for students who rely on community colleges for access to higher education is a matter of concern,” said Doug Shapiro, executive director of the Center, in a news release.

Tony