Watching Trump Derangement Syndrome in action in 2020
We’re only five days into 2020, but thanks to the Soleimani strike, Trump Derangement Syndrome is already exceeding anything we’ve seen before.
I knew that 2019 wasn’t the year of peak crazy Trump Derangement Syndrome, despite the excesses of the House’s impeachment process. I knew that the Left would be compulsively driven to up its game during the election year. and I must say, less than a week in 2020, and with help from the Soleimani strike, the Left has already surpassed itself in ways I never could have imagined. Today, I thought I’d give you a look at three articles from Leftists who can’t even when it comes to daily horrors of the Trump presidency.
First up is Robert Reich. In 2020, Hillary toured the world in ugly muumuus while imagining she was Mrs. President and Bill vanished from the scene ever since Jeffrey “I did not kill myself” Epstein’s arrest. They were easy to ignore.
Hard Left Clinton gnome Robert Reich, though, just won’t go away. And when I say “gnome,” I’m not referring to his physical stature, which is an unkind trick of nature. I’m referring to his minuscule mental stature, which is entirely his own fault and which is something that keeps him in the spotlight as a Leftist intellectual icon.
Reich’s latest insights appear in an article entitled “Trump’s lawless thuggering is corrupting justice in America.” Before I get to Reich’s specifics, let me provide some context using a few flashbacks to the lawless and law-disrespecting Obama years:
- Obama ignores America’s immigration laws and creates his own imaginary laws.
- “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
- Operation Fast and Furious.
- Obama spies on journalists.
- Obama uses the IRS to manipulate political speech.
- Benghazi.
- “[T]he Cambridge police acted stupidly….”
- Bowie Bergdahl pardon.
- Bradley Manning pardon.
- Oscar Lopez Rivera pardon.
- Hillary Clinton’s secret server (about which Obama and his administration knew, because they emailed her).
- The NSA’s spying scandal.
- The New Black Panthers’ voter intimidation scandal.
- And of course, the granddaddy of them all, illegally spying on the Trump campaign.
I don’t think I need to list all of the corruption that dogged Bill Clinton’s administration, when Robert Reich served as Bill’s Secretary of Labor. If you’ve forgotten, here’s a decent list, although because it stops with the “top” scandals from that era, it’s very incomplete.
So how does Reich claim Trump has brought lawlessness to America? First and foremost, he brought “America to the brink of an illegal war with Iran without any congressional approval, in direct violation of Congress’s war-making authority under the Constitution.”
Did you catch that clever word play? Yes, Congress has the power to declare war (Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 11), but Trump didn’t start a war as even Reich admits. Nothing in the Constitution says Congress shall have the Power “to have a say in whether the president brings America to the brink of war.”
In fact, according to the words of the Supreme Court more than 150 years ago,
If a war be made by invasion of a foreign nation, the President is not only authorized but bound to resist force by force. He does not initiate the war, but is bound to accept the challenge without waiting for any special legislative authority.
Sorry, Reich; you’re wrong. And just as importantly, as best as I can tell, you didn’t make a peep when, out of the blue, Obama announced that he was going to invade Libya because Qaddafi, who had sidelined himself a decade before, might be a problem later. That decision destroyed the Libyan infrastructure, set the stage for Benghazi, and turned Libya into a terrorist haven.
Other signs of Trump’s lawlessness according to Reich?
Even before outing the whistleblower, Trump had whipped his followers into a lather by calling the whistleblower a “spy,” who was guilty of “treason.” Reich is outraged. He argues that this “outing,” which occurred long before Trump retweeted an article with Ciaramella’s name, not only imperils the whistleblower’s safety, it violates the purpose of the Whistleblower Act, which is to protect people who alert authorities that government officials are violating the law.
Wrong again, little guy. First, Trump is factually right. The Whistleblower did act as a spy and, to the extent he was more concerned with destroy the presidency than righting a wrong, traitor is the right word.
But more significantly, there’s no reason for Trump not to speak is name. The prohibition to out the whistleblower’s name under the Whistleblower Act extends only to the Office of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community. (50 U.S.C. sec. 3033(g)(3)(A), “the Inspector General shall not disclose the identity of the employee without the consent of the employee….”) The reason is so that word doesn’t get back to the Whistleblower’s boss who might take vengeance against him. Trump, however, hasn’t done a darn thing and clearly won’t — at least until such time as it’s patently clear that Ciaramella was not a real Whistleblower, since he had no first hand information about the things he purported to whistle about, and was simply a partisan hack, probably acting on Schiff’s orders or advice.
Reich also indicts Trump for pardoning Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, even though it emerged that the latter had been falsely accused of killing an enemy combatant. I don’t recall Reich complaining when Obama pardoned Bradley Manning, who was responsible for one of the largest government security breaches; Bowe Bergdahl, a deserter who cost American lives; and Oscar Rivera Lopez, an active member of FALN, a Puerto Rico terrorist group responsible for dozens of sometimes deadly bombings. Also, I don’t recall Reich squawking when Bill Clinton illegally pardoned Marc Rich who, among other things, helped fund Khomeini.
The article goes on for a few more paragraphs, but those examples tell you exactly how seriously to take Reich when he accuses a Democrat president of lawlessness. This article is about his feelz, not facts.
Next in the line-up is an article from “Oona A. Hathaway, Professor of International law at Yale Law School.” Hathaway is very upset that Trump defied the U.S. Constitution when he ordered a military strike against Soleimani.
Again, I need to add a little predicate before I discuss Hathaway’s article. I’ve been a lawyer for more than 30 years. Very consistently, when I’ve dealt with Yale lawyers who graduated before around 1992, whether they’ve been progressives or conservatives, they have been the sharpest, most meticulous, most obsessively correct lawyers I’ve ever worked with or opposed. However, if Hathaway is indicative of the teachers currently at Yale Law school, God help our legal system. It’s doomed. Now back to my main point.
As was the case with Reich, who managed to be a legal nitwit despite having graduated from Yale Law before 1992, Hathaway, a professor who should know better, is also up in arms about Trump seizing an opportunity to off an identified terrorist. As Nikki Haley made plain two years ago, the UN had banned Soleimani from Iraq because he was exporting Iranian terrorism. In other words, Soleimani was no better than bin Laden or al Baghdadi — he just had the Iranian government at his back. That doesn’t matter to Hathaway, who sees killing a single terrorist as war. (I keep thinking of Daffy Duck telling Elmer or Bugs, “You realize, this means war!”)
The drone strike that killed Major General Qassem Soleimani, leader of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, raises many legal issues, but one of the most significant—at least to the American constitutional order—is that President Donald Trump ordered the strike without so much as informing Democratic leadership in Congress, disregarding Congress’s essential role in initiating war. If Congress fails to respond effectively, the constitutional order will be broken beyond repair, and the president will be left with the unmitigated power to take the country to war on his own—anywhere, anytime, for any reason.
A drone strike is not a war. As noted above, the Supreme Court specifically reserves to the President, who can react quickly and secretly, the right to respond unilaterally, without Congress, to acts of aggression on America soil. The President waited patient when it came to Soleimani and, sure enough, Soleimani attacked American soil when he organized the raid on the American embassy, which is American soil no matter where it’s located. Moreover, Trump had credible information that Soleimani was planning a much bigger attack against America.
And in case you need a reminder, don’t lose track of the fact that, as far as the Left was concerned when Obama started bombing Libya, even an actual war in response to a hypothetical threat is not a war if the Democrat president says it’s not. (To her credit and consistency, Hathaway also protested Obama’s illegal strikes but in that case, the facts were with her because massive bombing runs are a big deal.)
Because Soleimani was an important target, Hathaway tries to turn a single targeted drone strike (strikes of the type that the Left thought were charming and manly when Obama did them) into an act of war:
Their lawyers also almost certainly counseled that such action would be illegal. Any significant military action requires legal authority under both domestic and international law.
Hathaway is wrong (again). This wasn’t “significant military action.” It was a minimalist military action, the equivalent of a sniper’s shot, albeit against a significant and imminently threatening target.
I could continue picking on Hathaway’s article, but you get the sense of what’s going on. While she right castigated Obama’s dozens of bombing runs on Libya for violating the Constitution, she seems incapable of recognizing that a single drone strike against a terrorist illegally in a foreign land, who had just attacked America and was planning to do so again, is well within the president’s Constitutional rights and, indeed, falls squarely within his Constitutional responsibilities.
Lastly, I want to introduce you to an Elizabeth Warren supporter. Her name is Rebecca Solnit and she offers an honest description of her viewpoint: “I’m from the urban coastal immigrant-Jewish left myself….” Unfortunately, that description means that, once again, I have to be embarrassed to be Jewish. The article is awful in its passionate love for Warren. It’s like eating a bowl full of undiluted saccharine.
Solnit’s opening at least has the virtue of spelling out her biases upfront:
If I was [sic] going to invent a dream candidate, she would be grounded in small-town, rural or heartland America but able to hold her own in the citadels of power on the coasts. She would comfort the afflicted with the same passion with which she afflicts the comfortable, and she would understand the causes of those afflictions and have good ideas about how to remedy them. She would be moved by compassion but wouldn’t ask us to rely on compassion; she would have tangible strategies for widening our distribution of income, healthcare, education and opportunity, and she would be smart about the intersections of race, gender, class and the rest.
[snip]
My dream candidate would’ve been a woman of color with all these qualities, and my dreamiest dream candidate would be a woman of color with Medusa hair who could turn the entire Republican Senate to stone with a glance, but Warren is who’s left in the race, and she is magnificent, and superheroes from Megan Rapinoe to Roxane Gay agree.
(Because, don’t you know, the smart person always takes political cues from a soccer star who lacks grace and kindness, and from an academic feminist, novelist, and comic book author.)
That’s the dream and, according to Solnit, Warren is the reality. Now keep in mind that I have a particular bias against Warren because I had her as a banking law professor before she discovered she was Native American and went to Harvard. At the time, I’ll admit to being a confused student, but as a professor, she wasn’t helpful — plus she lied about what would be on the test. No warm feelings from me to her, that’s for sure.
One of the things that shows how strong Warren is, says Solnit, is how she’s handled unforgiving misogyny . . . notably from her own party, which is apparently composed of activists (including those in the mainstream media) who hate women:
The strength of her candidacy is shown by how she’s made it to the front of the race despite misogyny from across the political spectrum, the wrath of the billionaires pouring money – and themselves – into the race, and the smears and distortions of the mainstream media.
Oh, how I love internecine warfare on the Left!
But Warren isn’t just a tough woman. She has superpowers! Yes, she does:
Really I see her as a combination of three superpowers: wonkiness, radicalness and what for lack of a better term I would call Big Structural Mom Energy.
Big Structural Mom Energy. Wow, that sounds delicious! But what is it? Apparently it means to lead with your Leftist heart:
What I call Big Structural Mom Energy could also be called radical compassion. It lies in the homey delivery and quality of attention she brings to, for example, the young queer woman in Iowa she encouraged and hugged earlier this month. Warren, who has said more about trans rights than any other candidate, has made her credo clear, over and over: that everyone matters, and matters equally, and that the systems that shape our lives should value, defend and give everyone opportunity equally. She got a lot of attention for her comic answer to the question about what she’d say to someone opposed to marriage equality, but after the laughter was over, she said something she’s said in many forms in her campaign: “To me, that is the heart of it. That was the basis of the faith that I grew up in, and it truly is about the preciousness of each and every life.”
Just as a reminder that Warren doesn’t really mean it when she says “the preciousness of each and every life”. If it’s a baby in utero, that precious life isn’t worth a plugged nickel in Warren’s world.
So far, and I’m writing this on January 5, the new year shows that nothing in the preceding three years will have prepared us for the peak Trump Derangement Syndrome and general insanity that the Left has in store for us in the countdown to the election.
Here’s a word of advice: Even if you live in a super red state, such as Tennessee or Alabama, vote. It is a huge mistake in 2020 to think, My state will cough up the necessary Electoral College votes with or without my participation.”
The only way to cement a Trump re-election is for Trump to win, not just in the Electoral College, but with the popular vote too. America needs to keep him in the White House with overwhelming numbers, so be sure to do your bit.