Give Donald Trump credit.
He has managed to generate outrage and consternation among even the most complacent, oblivious, and complicit people who were seemingly blind to the decades-long effort by conservatives and the dark money behind them to destroy government of the people, by the people, and for the people in this country.
NY Times columnist and proponent of the Flat Earth theory of the modern global economy Thomas Friedman has finally had enough.
Where can we find the leadership to save the U.S.?
Give Friedman credit for going beyond Trump as the problem even as his fears from 2016 are realized.
“With Donald Trump now elected president, I have more fear than I’ve ever had in my 63 years that we could do just that — break our country, that we could become so irreparably divided that our national government will not function.”
Friedman unloads on Trump’s chief enablers:
Three years ago, I might have hoped that Senate Republicans would step in and restrain Trump. But now we all know better. The Senate Republican caucus today is nothing but a political brothel. Mitch McConnell is the madame. And McConnell and his caucus rent themselves out by the night to whomever will energize the Republican base to keep them in power and secure the economic benefits for their wealthiest donors.
Those energizers have been Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, coal companies, industrial polluters and now Trump’s most rabid supporters. It doesn’t matter who. The red light is always on above the door of the Senate G.O.P. caucus room.
It’s this kind of talk that gives sex workers a bad name. How long did it take Friedman to notice this? McConnell was there long before Trump arrived; he hasn’t been doing anything he wasn’t already doing. So was the TEA Party.
Friedman continues:
How about the social media barons? Will they save us from the toxic waste they now circulate? Certainly not Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who is clearly the Rupert Murdoch of his generation. He’s always justifying his cowardly choices with vacuous bromides about “free speech,” but he’s obviously just in it for the money — no matter how much his platform is used to destroy our democracy.
Where does Friedman see salvation coming from? He touches briefly on local leaders. “I think remarkable leadership is coming from some local politicians — so many great mayors of all colors and political stripes.” The Democratic Party? Not so much, other than barely name-checking Joe Biden.
Most of his enthusiasm is for the prospect of salvation by inspired… wait for it… corporate leadership.
So where to look? It is not hopeless. I hope America’s principled business leaders, and there are many, can find a way to come together to lead a healing discussion, maybe through the Business Roundtable, in the absence of a president willing and able to do so.
While Friedman can cite some sterling examples, he remains oblivious to the larger reality that the Trump and GOP agenda has benefitted the rich and corporations with lower taxes, deregulation, destruction of worker unions, a blind eye to mergers and de facto monopolies, the financialization of everything, and vulture capitalism. These people and their agenda have driven inequality to record levels, blocked action on climate change. They fund the think tanks and the media that put out disinformation. They fund the factories cranking out conservative activist judges and extremist right wing candidates.
Thomas Friedman seems to be unaware of the gospel of Milton Friedman, which has been used to define corporate citizenship as doing just one thing: increasing shareholder value. He is vaguely hoping that they will come to the rescue, truly an act of blind faith.
Without the pandemic, without the economic collapse, without the protests, would Friedman and others be having this epiphany right now? Impeachment came and went. The sight of armed lockdown protestors shutting down a state legislature was noted and then allowed to pass. The continuing corruption of the administration barely gets a mention these days. It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that what has made a difference for Friedman and the rest is that they can now see all of this impacting them personally.
It’s worth remembering Friedman’s track record. Enjoy his outrage, but don’t forget where he’s coming from.
It’s a sign of the times that the TODAY Show broadcasting from their studio in New York City is now doing so from behind walls protecting the windows that normally look out on the street. They had a brief segment on the news about a number of top people in the administration who claim they had no idea Trump was going to use force to clear away peaceful demonstrators just so he could have a photo op waving a bible. They were all ‘shocked’; they didn’t realize what was going on — but they all posed with him anyway. The Republican response has been the Sergeant Schulz defense: “I see nothing.” Friedman may be chronically clueless; these people are shameless.
Remember in November.