Donald Is No Cersei

For my own amusement and edification, I've been juxtaposing current events with my recent TV watching, trying to work through possibilities that I'm otherwise not reading about in the news.  These days I mainly watch TV while exercising, mostly the treadmill and then some light weights and other light exercises to break up the routine.  I'm on my second go round of Game of Thrones, in the middle of season 5, so just past the halfway point in the series.  This season introduces us to the Sparrows, a religious cult whose call is to weed out sin and corruption in the capital city, King's Landing.  They do this with very harsh methods.  I'll elaborate some on this below. 

Now I want to turn to President Biden's aspirations, to eliminate the civil war in our country, for all citizens to think of us as one people, and to come together to achieve goodness for the whole.  Those are noble aspirations and I support them.  But my normal skepticism makes me ask, can they be achieved?  If they can be achieved, what needs to happen under the present circumstances to get us there?  Are those things happening now?

I should point out that at the time of this writing we are less than one week into the new Biden-Harris administration. Most of the Cabinet member have not yet been confirmed by the Senate.  Indeed, Merrick Garland, who was chosen to be Attorney General, and is the most interesting potential Cabinet member from the perspective of this post, is not likely to be confirmed soon as the Hearings have not yet begun for his position.  Readers should recall that President Obama nominated Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court, but then Majority Leader McConnell refused to bring his candidacy to the Senate, saying that position should be filled by the next President.  That decision rubbed many people the wrong way, including me.  It hangs over the current nomination and confirmation process.  If we do get through Merrick Garland's confirmation, it will be interesting to see how his office proceeds in moving forward the Biden objectives.

Now let's consider the main idea of this piece.  Trump clearly committed sedition in stirring up the rioters on and before January 6.  He likely committed many other crimes, while in office and during the campaign in 2016.  So far he has been held accountable for none of the prior crimes, and it is unclear how the Senate Trial for the sedition will turn out.  What is clear is that Trump had many enablers, including many Republican members of Congress, but also those in the media who promoted his lies as truth, those in the tech world who gave him a social media platform to speak to his base and to the rest of the world, and high roller donors to the Republican party, who provided the glue to keep this all together. Whether any or all of these enablers are thus themselves guilty of crimes, perhaps as accessories after the fact, perhaps in some other capacity, I will leave to others.  Instead, here I want to argue that it is necessary for the Biden objectives to be achieved that these enablers own up to what they've done and do so in a straightforward way.  Then they must atone for this and do so in a way that is acceptable to all.

Will we get there without further concerted effort or is a current day version of Sparrows needed to "encourage" the enablers to find the right path?  This piece, Why McConnell Dumped Trump, suggests that there may now be a civil war within the Republican party.  The various corporate sponsors have pulled their funding as a consequence of the denial that Biden won the election and the January 6 attempted coup.  Those who represent corporate interests are on one side of the war.  The Trumpistas are on the other side.  If the corporate side feels a need to speak honestly about the time when they refused to recognize the Biden victory and then make various amends for the damage they have wrought, that might be enough.  But Republicans in Congress have been living in a world of denial and corruption.  To expect an honest accounting now may simply be too much to ask. 

Thus, the idea of 21st century Sparrows, whose aim is to fight corruption and blatant lying in public affairs, has some appeal, at least as a fantasy, especially if they can reform the public servants so they behave decently henceforth.  I want to note here that Sparrows would not otherwise have a political agenda; their entire objective would be focused on getting rid of the lies and corruption in politics. 

In Game of Thrones, the Sparrows kidnap very important people and then imprison them in the Sept, the physical home for their religion.  While the imprisonment is harsh, the harshness is needed to cleanse the souls of those imprisoned.  It seems to work, and the persons who go through the regime are changed in a fundamental way.  They no longer focus on their own needs and instead look to benefit others.  There is one exception to this, Cersei.  I don't want to be a spoiler.  Seasons 5 and 6 of Game of Thrones are worth viewing just for this part of the story.  (It is a many threaded show and there is much other intrigue going on at the same time that I won't write about here.)  

Cersei is Machiavellian in the extreme and in that sense is similar to Donald Trump.  But, to make sense of the title of this post, she does things with planning and forethought.  Trump seems much more impulsive and tends not to think things through very well, if at all. Even a very harsh regime might not fundamentally change someone who is so Machiavellian.  It may instead create an urge for revenge.  

I started to wonder what 21st century Sparrows look like and do.  I quickly found myself out of my element, so I'm not even going to try to sketch some alternative.  Others who read this piece might be able to offer up suggestions of how it might work.  So, instead, I will close with the following observation.  During Trump's Presidency, many of those who worked for the Executive Branch resigned in disgust, and likewise many of those in Congress did not seek reelection in 2018.  These people had some insider information, but didn't have a way to use it in a way to change the course of how things were done.  There are whistleblower laws, but they aren't sufficient to get this outcome.  Perhaps a current version of Sparrows could for based on those observations.

What Learning Theory Has To Say About Current Politics

About 9  years ago I wrote a post entitled, Is reasoning taking a beating?  It describes the following example, which is about a more general issue.  What happens when a person confronts evidence that contradicts the person's prior held world view?  Many people tend to discard the evidence.

In the book, What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain teaches us that students don't know what to do when they confront evidence that contradicts their prior held world view.  Perhaps it is surprising to learn that the initial student reaction is to deny the evidence.  The world view has sanctity and deep down the student wants to preserve it.  The excellent teacher understands the tension the student is under.  With patience and persistence, the instructor nudges the student to reconsider his position.  It would be good for that position to account for the evidence that is observed.  Of course, in this case Bain is referring to an academic matter.  When looking at circular motion the students are apt to have an Aristotelian view.  A Newtonian perspective appears unnatural.  There is a getting used to period necessary to take on the new perspective.  There is leadership in helping students make the transition.

So, in physics class, it seems clear that the instructor needs to challenge students in their prior held beliefs and then nurse them through their cognitive dissonance when those beliefs run counter to the facts. How long it takes for the students to embrace a different explanation, one that is consistent with the facts, I can't say.  But I would suspect that the students may be angry with the teacher during that time interval, because the teacher is forcing them out of their comfort zone.  

Now, I won't push this much further, but I'm sure that people my age recall the criticism of liberal bias in the news, which was heard frequently prior to Fox News becoming an important force.  If people get their news exclusively from one source, and if that news has non-factual information, that surely is how the viewers form their prior world view when confronting the facts.  (It's possible that the news organization is simply mistaken, but it's also possible that the news organization deliberately obfuscates the facts.)   Who then plays the role of the patient teacher, who educates the audience to accept the facts, by changing their prior held worldview?  Conversely, it seems possible that with nobody to play the role of patient teacher, that people get so locked into their world view they then treat it as absolute truth.  

Here is one last point and then I'll close.  One role of education that is quite important, though many people tend to ignore it, is for the learner to develop a healthy skepticism about whatever new ideas come along.  The scientific method is based on such skepticism.  The skepticism allows the person to consider the evidence without seeing it as an undo threat. True Believers (a term I first heard from Eric Hoffer) don't have such skepticism.  A lot has been made as of late about non-college Whites versus Whites with college.  But I haven't seen anything said about how that distinction maps into the skepticism (or not) of the individual.  I think that connection needs to be drawn out.

My Take

I didn't sleep well last night, and I'm sure many other Americans were in the same boat.  I don't quite feel the same rage I did yesterday evening, but I've been fixated on this stuff all day today.  So I'm writing this post mainly to get it out of my system.  We'll see tomorrow whether there is any change in how I'm doing.  Another reason to write this, however, is that we're bombarded by news that by its very nature focuses on the very recent past (the last two or three days).  I think we need to look further back and connect that look to the present.  Doing that won't help at all manage the next 13 days.  But it should be useful in considering what should happen once the Biden-Harris Administration has taken over, preferably after a smooth transition.  

I want to focus on two things to give some structure to this analysis.  First, Trump seems to have a tendency to accuse the opposition of crimes that he and his cronies have actually committed.   Since the election he has been complaining that the election was stolen.  Did Trump and his cronies steal the election in 2016?  This question needs to be hammered on.  Prior to writing this piece I did two Google searches, one on truth serum, the other on polygraph tests.  Based on what I found, neither are considered very reliable.  So I won't consider them further here.  But I will speculate about Trump being imprisoned for sedition, where his guilt of that crime is as plain as day.  Once imprisoned, he needs to be interviewed, repeatedly, with those interviews recorded.   There may very well be other issues to ask about apart from whether the election in 2016 was stolen, such as how his personal debt impacted his decisions as President and why he refused to have his tax returns made public.  And, of course, a complete psychiatric profile needs to be developed.  Nevertheless, it would be good to hear what he believes happened in 2016.  

The other issue is about the various Republican Members of Congress who have ultimately recognized the election of President Elect Biden and Vice President Elect Harris, so seemingly want to absolve themselves of any earlier complicity in the misdeeds of Trump.  That will not wash.  What is needed is to make that complicity explicit and then hammer on it repeatedly.  At a minimum, these Republicans need to acknowledge what they have wrought.  After that, they should either resign from office or atone in a way that is evident to their Democratic colleagues and to Democratic voters.   By focusing on these Republicans here, I'm certainly not absolving those other Republican Members of Congress who haven't recognized the election. They have to be dealt with as well.  At the end I'll mention a few thoughts about that.  The point here is that they are on record with a list of their names available now. 

Items to consider to address these issues are:

1. The Mueller Report
1. Would a fair reading of the report warrant an impeachment of Trump on the merits, not on the politics?  Focusing on the merits, would this be a close call or a slam dunk?
   
2. The politics seemed to dictate that there would be no impeachment as long as the Republicans held a majority of the House.  And there would be no conviction, in the event of impeachment, as long as the Republicans held a majority in the Senate.
   
2. Attorney General Barr's successful effort to deep six the Mueller Report
1. Barr is but one of many Trump appointees who protected Trump from what may have seemed at the time to be a political witch hunt, only to subsequently fall out of favor with the President.
2. In hindsight, would Barr himself feel his actions with regard to the Mueller Report were warranted, or were they enabling Trump and set the stage for the recent events.
   
3. The actual Impeachment
4. The pro forma Senate Trial after the impeachment

In coming up with this list I'm following a suggestion by Masha Gessen published in the New Yorker soon after the election, Why America Needs A Reckoning With The Trump Era.  One imagines that President Biden would appoint a Trump Era Commission (I hope the name of the commission is better than that) and includes luminaries so the recommendations of the commission are taken seriously.  I would expect the chair of the commission to be Chief Justice John Roberts (who might have to recuse himself when the Senate Trial is considered), Michael Mukasey who was the last Attorney General under President George W. Bush, and Eric Holder who was the first Attorney General under President Barack Obama would be members, as would some prominent law school deans, with balance between those leaning Democrat and those leaning Republican part of the consideration concerning who was chosen.  

I also want to note that it would be an impossible standard to imagine that all Americans will accept the recommendations of such a commission, especially those in Congress who did not accept the Biden-Harris election results and those who are like minded with the people who stormed the Capitol.  But the remaining Republicans in Congress, and especially their wealthy supporters, must accept these conclusions, even if they are scathing in pointing out their negligence and tacit enabling of Trump's malfeasance.  There then is the question about what punishment should ensue after that.  Let's leave that question for a bit and turn to another that needs some answering, though I'm no lawyer so won't pretend to give a real answer here. 

Consider the possibility where the Commission concludes that, in so many words, Trump did steal the election in 2016 and committed a variety of illegal acts to do so.  That would make his entire Presidency illegitimate.  Particularly relevant for the discussion here is whether the Pardons he has recently handed out to his co-conspirators remain valid.  (There is also the issue of all those judicial appointments.  I've taken that up some in a previous post.)  If these pardons stand, then it would seem the co-conspirators would have little reason to testify in front of the Commission except to market their up and coming book (I assume most will generate income that way). If the pardons would be negated, the testifying a la plea bargaining would seem what should be expected.  Which of these would be the outcome I can't say, but it needs to be determined.  The way the Commission would proceed will depend on this.

Regarding punishment, let me say that the punishment would be for hyper partisanship leading to negligence, thereby enabling President Trump's malfeasance.  In my mind, Senator McConnell as the Majority Leader should be forced to resign, but that needs real pressure behind the scene to achieve that outcome.  In an earlier post, Tough Love for Republican Enablers of Trump Who Will Still Be Serving in Government in 2021, I wrote the following:

I'm sure the reader wants to know what sort of actual punishment will serve as this tough love.  I want to know too.  The ideal punishment would achieve the goals but then not be recklessly used by future generations, when there is no need for it.  I'm not fully conversant with the powers the Commander in Chief can wield, but this much I would be willing to offer.  Suppose the then President Biden aggressively exercises some power and perhaps abuses power to a certain extent.  (Following Trump would seem to give some license to doing that.)  Congress would then want to curb that power and Biden would agree to legislation that does that.  Passing the legislation would reign in future abuses, one would hope.  Until the legislation is passed, the power would be used quite aggressively. 

By means of illustration, suppose the President asserts that for National Security reasons, Senator X must be detained indefinitely and while in detention the Senator will be incommunicado, even with family. Likewise, this will happen for Representative Y, Federal Judge Z, and even one of the Supreme Court Justices appointed under Trump.  President Biden will say that others who might potentially receive such punishment can avoid it either by resigning or, in the case of elected officials, by stopping the obstruction and playing the game as it should be played. Then, let this sink in for a while, become the new normal for a certain amount of time, and let the frustration on the Republican side build, while the cooperative behavior in Congress also increases. 

Now imagine that the first to be detained are those Senators who did not recognize the Biden-Harris election and the next on the list are some of the Representatives who did likewise.  Biden doing this might truly scare Republican Members of Congress.  He is everyone's Uncle Joe, and this would be a very mean thing to do. Yet it would be a perfect getting even activity, and since his predecessor abused his office, it opens a window for Biden to do likewise.  This can be accompanied with something that sounds more official, a Censure, but the reality is that the Censure is of symbolic importance only. There is no other punishment that comes with Censure.

It seems to me that ultimately the hyper partisanship can end only if the big Republican funders reach the conclusion that it encourages things to get out of hand.  To them, Trump was a disaster.  Yet now there is a competition of sorts among certain Members of Congress to become the next Trump clone.  These high rollers need to lessen their expectations on their traditional objectives - less taxation and less regulation - to move us off this path to fascism, which is where this seems to be going now.  To prevent that, it might not be so bad for the Democrats to be in control for a while.  We're not out of the woods yet, for sure.  But, at least, there does seem to be a path where we can return to something that seems normal.