Still riding with Biden July 11 and July 12,13, 14.15

July 15 update: The discussion topic about changing horses in the middle of the race is now on ice due to the near-assassination attempt on Trump. By the time the RNC convention is over, it will be even closer to the middle of the race, where campaign organization, funding, and delegates are already in place and will be seriously disrupted, too late to reorient to a different candidate. Internal polling will have been digested, and Biden will have had even more opportunities to demonstrate his mental acuity, putting "concerns" on ice also, as he has done post-debate and as he "gets his Irish up".  

If turning down the heated rhetoric, fascism, and other trigger words are avoided, it is easier than ever to make the points of what Trump's 2nd term would bring that would be a danger to ordinary Americans and make America weaker, not greater. Trump's personal toughness only reveals better judgment or change in his caring about others other than himself or the middle class.  Running against Project 2025 and the RNC platform related to it gives that chance.  Trump will be put in a bind distancing himself on issues in risking ticking off the base who support the contents of either.  Trump cannot get away with distancing itself from such very unpopular positions. 

  July 12 update: I am listening to comments about Biden, his impressive performance at the NATO presser, and his mental acuity. One of the strangest was, well, he showed great acuity when he talked about foreign policy but not when he talked about his own health. Come on....either he has sufficient acuity in his brain, or he doesn't. There may be other matters at work here...like he is getting attacked because of his age. How does acuity disappear or appear, given the topic???????

It appears that the political professionals look at their polls and get cold feet. Past polls show no Democrat can beat Trump, including Harris, and Biden has historically low approval rates. Sure, he does; if you ask, he is too old, and that has been consistent for the last 3 years as, yes, while Biden guided us for the best recovery from COVID in the world. If you ask if given the choice between Trump and him nationally in public polls (very unreliable), the answer is different: a tie. His approval ratings may be historically low, but his opponent is historically a fright, called by those close to him when he was president unfit for the job, determined to upend democracy and establish a dictatorship/(kindliy called an autocracy,0 with Trump at the top and a supreme court already in his pocket greenlighting criminal acts. The GOP anointed candidate is threatening to upend very popular government policies such as saving Ukraine and NATO while making his Project 2025 administration the 'culture of life", replacing civil service with a corrupt and incompetent spoils system full of political hacks, and ending any programs that benefit even their own constituents like, Medicaid and further destroying rural health providers whose funding has been saved by getting paid for their services via Medicaid. I live in a rural area, and I get it. If Democrats can get heads out of their behinds, maybe others in the MAGA rural world could get that message, too.

My thoughts about the political pros who said, well, Trump will attack him for being feeble are In these past two weeks, all that has happened is that Trump has been given the gift of sound bites uttered by fearful once-Biden supporters. It is as if the press and those wanting the torch to be passed are laying the groundwork for self-fulfilling their own prophecy. The ultimate key to Biden's decision is as he said it: no path to victory, even as Harris would do worse. The final decider will be internal polls of 3 battleground states and Biden's own interpretation of them.

The past two weeks after the awful debate have been nothing about that, so Biden should remove himself. This reminds me of the FDR phrase, but in the reverse of their cold feet, it is: you are fearing your fear itself. What if internal polls (more accurate) show even Harris cannot beat Trump? In fact, the whole nature of the Trump campaign will turn this into the most racist white nationalist/misogynist campaign in history, fearing Harris' credentials as the point person on women's rights, Trump's Achilles heel. In short, if Biden defers to Harris as the candidate, the entire focus of the rest of the presidential campaign will be different. It is still a crap shoot, a gamble,., but a different game with a new deck of cards dealt.

July 11 We need to get this settled ASAP/ So far, all we have done has made it harder for Biden to win, giving Trump et al. sound bites ad infitim.   Of all the nerve: after engineering the flubbed and awful reporting and opinion pages demanding Biden step down, the New York Times dares write the opinion piece today that Trump is unfit to be president. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/11/trump-new-york-times-00167529 ThNYT: Trump unfit to lead  after they just gave Trump a boost to his campaign. Let's get this matter settled now, but what is happening is that everyone is looking at internal polling (these public polls are all over the place). They often ask the wrong questions anyway. Four different questions get four different answers: 

1), is Biden too old? That one in any poll is "yes". 

The question #2 is: Given what you know now, which would you vote for: Biden or Trump. Still, a tie, unchanged, in national public opinion polls, but the real polls that count are in 3 battleground states. Voters had already "discounted" Biden's age. 

#3 The third question is whether Kamala Harris's poll would be better in question number 2 than Biden's. So far, I haven't heard anything. Notice that the Black Caucus voted to support Biden over anyone else, including Harris. Maybe they know something the rest of us do not. Above all, they are realists.

 #4. What if Biden fails to complete the term? Who cares if Trump wins. My answer:If Biden wins, the team with Harris at the top is more than capable of continuing on.

Why I have refrained from calling Donald Trump a fascist.

Updated 2 25 2017
 I have refrained from calling the Trump administration fascist. It is not there yet.  It is too early to tell and the constraints of law and the Constitution may keep President Trump from putting some of his innate tendencies into practice. However, every day it seems Trump's actions resemble even more the examples of fascism as practiced in the 20th century.

The definition of fascism as a philosophy is complex, but actions can be the the definer, too.     Calling someone fascist brings to mind Hitler, the gas chambers, the hyper nationalism, the rallies and parades, and a goal of economic recovery based on ramping up the military/industrial complex,  blaming and scapegoating minorities, and feeding on the emotions of those who hate "others".   Hitler seems to personify it in many minds, though the 20th-century ideological roots are actually in Italy and Mussolini and not all authoritarian governments are fascist.

 While President Trump certainly does not fit the extreme Hitler mold, there are some similar elements to the rise of fascism in Europe found in Trump's tweets and orders and techniques,  such as holding rallies to whip up supporters' enthusiasm and hyper-nationalism, exaggerating potential external security threats and the weakness of our military,  and the failure of an economy,. He is ignoring the fact that the economy has the lowest unemployment rate since 2009 and had a pre-election robust Wall Street. True, the blue-collar middle class has been left behind. Whatever Trump advocates, the US in 2017 is nowhere like Germany in the early '30s that was decimated by reparations and the Depression.

With crowd-pleasing rhetoric and tweets, Trump claims the only facts that are not fake are those considered true by the Trump administration. He verbally delegitimizes other centers of power,  courts, and their judges,   and media.  Stephen Bannon is the president's most trusted and closest adviser and is also an example of the hatred factor found in fascism. Bannon had been CEO  of Breitbart, the media public platform for white supremacists and ultra-nationalists.  Leading to Trump's own rise on the political scene was "Obama was born in Kenya" birtherism crusade, considered by many to be dog whistles to racists. Whether or not Bannon and he are racists and bigots themselves is the lesser issue.  Like Bannon  Trump tolerates and exploits racism for political gain, even being reluctant to condemn bigotry until forced to. His Muslim ban obviously appeals to religious bigots. Pressed for weeks to condemn Jewish cemetery vandalism and threats against religious centers, he finally made a statement last week condemning anti-Semitism.

These last couple of weeks of his media relations were particularly disturbing and brought him a step closer to qualifying as at least a wannabe fascist.  Looking at how the fascist movement got into power in the last century, we can see some similarities.  One is an attempt to bully and control the press and to take over the messaging. Trump is beginning the process by excluding "opposition" outlets.  CNN and the New York Times were kept from the press "gaggle"at a non-televised briefing at the White House and Trump and his spokespeople have refused to call on reporters who represented media promoting stories critical of him. These were obvious attempts at "punishing" CNN and the Times. Their sin: reporting on Trump's possible even closer relationship with Russians during the campaign.

The most serious media-related event raised the question of whether his administration had tried to influence the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign's colluding with the Russians. One version reported by the media was that Reince Priebus, Trump's chief of staff, had approached the FBI director asking him to tamp down a report being leaked from the agency as flawed because there was no evidence any Russian contact involved Russian agents. The Trump administration did not deny the contact had been made with Russians, but said it was not their agents, and counterclaimed that the FBI director had approached Priebus. If the latter is true, then the FBI's impartiality and credibility in their Russian related investigations into Russian hacking and meddling in the 2016 elections are jeopardized. If the administration initiated the contact with the FBI, then they are verging on a Nixon-like cover-up and look guilty that there is a fire in the smoke. Adding to suspicions that there is something there there,  as many have noted, Trump has never flatly denied that contact with  Russians and his campaign staff occurred but instead has tried to deflect attention to "illegal leaks",  as a way to direct public attention and media focus elsewhere and a way to scotch deeper probes.

 Either way, the exchange with the FBI flap is not good news for the Trump administration. In that dust-up, what has been clear is that the Trump administration is fearful that the FBI or the other investigations being conducted by intelligence agencies will find the smoking gun of collusion with  Russian agents. If that collusion turns out to be sanctioned or conducted by Donald Trump himself or others in his campaign acting under his direction, that could lead to impeachment at worse or destroying the credibility, legitimacy,  and effectiveness of the administration at best.  The stakes are very high.

.Populism has also been an element in the rise of fascism.  Candidate Trump's appeal to the blue-collar working demographic was more populist than corporate.  Ironically, a  corporatist element has been added to  Trump's presidential administration with the appointment of the team of billionaires to the various cabinet posts. These cabinet officers have been charged to de-construct their departments, eliminating consumer and environmental protections that were designed to protect the middle class from corporate excesses.

The populist rationale Trump has pitched to the public is that this pro-business, anti-environment/consumer approach will lead to high paying job creation in the rust belt and national economic growth. Those most affected by economic struggles are without a college education and robotics have replaced many of those jobs once held by human beings. Some blame unions, too, for holding back efficiencies. Trump has not provided any plan to fix those problems but instead has blamed bad trade policies.  Whether protectionism will result in high paying jobs with a workforce ill-equipped to fill them or reduce robotics is doubtful. If proof of Russian collusion does not lead to his defeat in 2020, his failure to provide promised economic growth and high paying job creation will. As counties who voted for Obama in the past then went for  Trump in 2016 showed,  populism is a fickle beast.

Another parallel with the practice of German fascism is Trump's reliance on militarism to promote US leadership in the world. The current world order he is de-constructing is one based on mutual defense treaties  (NATO) and multinational economic and trade arrangements. Instead, Trump's vision of leadership is relying on military muscle power as a threat to deter attacks and as a "might makes right" bully power over the rest of the world.  Where it does differ from Hitler's rise is that Hitler used military buildup in manufacturing as an argument to the public, promoting it as a way to pull Germany out of the depression.

Donald Trump had wanted to display military weapons and missile launchers in his inauguration parade, but the US military declined that opportunity. Red Square type parades are not far from his mind. Whatever the reason for militarism, if diplomacy and treaties are not tried first, we can imagine where a crisis might lead. For some in history promoting military conflict was a way to make the  "pledge to the leader" a patriotic duty. To increase an autocrat's power, the exaggeration of threats to national interests and persecution of ethnic groups are familiar modus operandi.even in our current memories, from Milosevic's Balkan Wars in the 1990s to Russia's stealth invasions of the Crimea, Georgia, and Ukraine. It is no wonder a recent poll showed the majority of Americans fear involvement in another major war.  The danger is that we are living in a nuclear age where miscalculations and political ambitions could lead to disasters far greater than the world wars of the 1900s

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There is a very comprehensive discussion of this : https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/fascism-populism-presidential-election/510668/

http://thehill.com/homenews/news/320574-poll-majority-of-americans-fear-us-will-become-involved-in-another-major-war

http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-inauguration-parade-tanks-missile-launchers-2017-1

http://www3.nd.edu/~salder/RB.pdf puts blame on the Rust Belt decline on unions
MIT looks at the impact of robotics and the need for greater worker education  https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602869/manufacturing-jobs-arent-coming-back/


Footnote:  while I usually do not use Wikipedia as a source, I did tap into their definition of fascism and its history.  It seemed comprehensive and well documented.  I did not rely on it alone, though, drawing on my undergraduate background in history and political science and first-hand encounter with the results of fascism in an academic year spent in post-war Berlin in 1957. It was a  grassroots attempt to find out how and why it happened there. My intellectual curiosity has not dimmed over the years.  I number among many life long friends and relatives by marriage the recounting of their personal experiences and memories of the rise of fascism and communism in their native countries.