Category: Donald Trump

I realize that A.O.C. tells it like it is. And putting it in a perverse way, we can ask if Trump’s 750 dollars he surrenders on federal court taxes or the I.R.S. will be the last straw? I dunno.

I did get one of my friends to laugh when I suggested we all pitch in — a 10-person pod — and pay his taxes this year. Think about it, wouldn’t that be fun?

Another way to look at it is that for all the white supremacy that is being mentioned and discussed, in the end, Trump has not passed any anti-Civil Rights legislation. To be sure, he has destroyed the lives of so many children and their parents who cross borders. But he has passed no legislation other than tax reform.

Yet do “the people” care? Trump will most likely prevail with getting his Supreme Court nominee on the bench. This is another nail in the coffin of a country that has lacked a national agenda, not just national leaders who reflect what most people want.

At the beginning of the millennium, the Rehnquist Court rolled back the extent of federal authority with little notice. The Court limited the central government’s reach, giving more rights to people wanting guns but not helping those PwD (read: people with disabilities) and women who need protection from violence.

Putting her on the bench will have a long-lasting effect, long past my years. But as A.O.C. just said, maybe we “deserve to decline.”

As one vote of 435, she has little power other than as a national spokesperson. She unpacks issues like intersectionality very well and has enraged the “progressive” Democrats as much as or more than Republicans. A.O.C. is closing the age gap.

So it seems to me that Separation of Powers no longer works. There are not three equal branches sharing powers. Nor is there one branch, like a unitary executive that can get much done. What we can see looking at the 20th and 21st centuries is that the U.S. government functions well only if a President is a national representative and does not rig the Supreme Court.

This joining of the Presidency and the Judiciary is toxic. The President should lead Congress or defer to Congress without the Judiciary striking down legislation on issues like gun control, violence against women, and protection of persons with disabilities.#

American Political Development is history at its worst.  At least, that’s what some historians who reside in the United States and teach in American history might say about our field — it’s “presentist.” We throw in any American teleology, or pull any trajectory into reverse.  But is it reverse engineering?

As we start from the present and move backwards, digging and delving into all those institutional nooks and crannies, tracing, mapping, and locating the so-called origins of any public policy that spans the United States, from the laws establishing the defunct ICC to the EEOC, are we really being presentist, or are we “institutionalists”?  (The damn autocorrect makes me put this in quotes.)  It’s not a search for APD; it’s a search for the American nation-state, or at least that cozy social-welfare policy state, which today seems like magical thinking, or (heaven forbid) what the so-called conservatives call the “nanny state?”

In fact, though, it’s not the search for the American nation-state, nor the American states.  It’s closer to home than that. And aside from “manalyzing” with David Waldstreicher in the course we’re team-teaching this semester, I’d say Trump has managed to localize the nation-state — for me, that is.  It’s the localization of the State — the Sovereign, not the states.  

And it only makes sense, if you study corruption.  From Papi Trump (the German?), to Papa Trump (the Swede, haha), and now baby Trump (not Donald J., but the one with the comb-over hair), they all bribed politicians in the states, as well as serving the State, let alone all the neighboring municipalities in greater New York.  So it comes as no surprise that Penn Station would house all those lobbying the nation-state, foreigners and domestic lobbyist no matter.

After all, how did robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt have so much money after receiving so much public land? The business of America has always been business. That said, we have to remember that Trump is a developer of “real” estate (i.e. physical property). There’s no other eviction that hurts so much as what a landlord can do by making one homeless. So why do so many liberals believe Congress could ever evict Trump out of the White House?

More later. But for now, David?

 We are all suffering from some form of Trump-induced PTSD. Emergency-room visits were up the day after 11/9, as a creative-writing friend of mine pointed out this perverse inversion of 9/11 after the presidential election of 2016.  I have friends and colleagues in all disciplines — Spanish literature, comparative political thought, literary theory, interdisciplinary pedagogy taught in Dutch and international English, let alone American politics, law and society, American political development (APD), and American (or better yet, comparative) political thought (APT & CPT). We would all laugh at the buffoon if he were not so scary. When you’re terrified, you can only titter.

So, what now? I, for one, am going back in both time and thought. Like many of my friends, I have to put my head into history for a time.  My sabbatical is being spent writing about American tribalism, which references merging APT/APD and CPT, though there is no CPD, since APD is CPD.  Huh?  Really, what I’m doing is streamlining inter- and intradisciplinary research on comparative political thought and politics and history broadly cast over eras and epochs.  How do you get to comparisons that are global, given our now-embarrassing global American empire?  Easy: We must go abroad and note the other perspectives, even if we don’t put them in more than our footnotes or register the comparisons with European Union nations, particularly the Netherlands.

The Dutch, after all, had more legitimacy and authority in the colonies that became the United States over 150 years later. Dutch-Anglo, not Anglo-Dutch, thought is more persuasive when you think of the founding canon in American political thought. It’s just that the English, in 1661, knocked those pesky merchants’ republican ideas out of enlightenment and post-enlightenment Anglo-American political thought. The Dutch not only predated the English, but also the English, Scottish and French Enlightenments.

This is all academese, I know, that will be explained later. For now, I must explore the history of the texts, Baruch Spinoza and heretical thought. Indeed, I saw the first book in Heretical Thought — Assembly, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri — in a radical bookshop, or boekhandel, near Spinoza’s likeness where he lived in Amsterdam.  My college-age son and I are not the only fans of Assembly.  According to Rebecca Goldstein, it took 200 years before any scholar could comfortably cite his heretical thought.

Comparing history of thought or schools of thought — not just heretical thought or Dutch-Anglo-American political thought, where Hugo Grotius is possibly more important than William Blackstone — could be considered heresy — or not.* There are many academic and public historians, from Joyce Goodfriend to Russell Shorto, who show how the British rewrote American colonial political thought.  

* The references here, I admit, are academic and yet not obscure if you follow the train of hyperlinks or references to the plethora of different or multiple schools of thought and political traditions.