Will Americans follow Trump back to civil war?

t seems not even unequivocal rejection--twice--by the US Supreme Court  is enough to convince Donald Trump he can no longer be dictator beyond January 20, 2021.  Within hours he was back on Twitter slamming the Supreme Court for "lacking wisdom and courage" to install him as president as a matter of arbitrary gift.

   He had abandoned all pretensions of protesting the election results. He just wanted the whole election itself discarded and the office of the president awarded to him by judicial decree.

    The US Supreme Court refused. Now he wants individual state legislatures to appoint electors who would vote for Trump in the electoral college--regardless of the actual election result in their states. He is fairly realistic though, he did not call for all fifty states to do it, just four: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin---battle ground states where he lost to Joe Biden.  But since those states are not minded to do that, he got one state--Texas--to file suit against these four seeking to compel them to do it by mandatory injunction. 

    It is a laughable legal theory--one state complaining about how another state conducts its own affairs. That the Supreme Court rejected the attempt is a no-brainer.

   Now true constitutionalists are worried he might try to resurrect his dead-and-embalmed "massive electoral fraud complaint" on the floor of the Electoral College. That's not possible. 

   The Electoral College is not an actual assembly, it's a political construct. On a common date--this time it is December 14--the electors of each state would meet in their respective state capitals to cast their votes for President. So there's not a single venue where all these electors unionwide would be present in the same room participating in one common session. There will be fifty sessions held in fifty different venues. Thus it is  impossible to disrupt all fifty proceedings at the same time to derail the voting.  

    Except for a handful of states, the general policy is to award all the electoral votes of each state to the candidate who won the popular vote. This means  the electors will be casting their votes based on the official results certified by the board of election supervisors in each state. Those results have been finalized and "locked in" last December 8--the so-called "safe harbor date." Beyond that date no more protests against those results could be instituted.

    In other words, Donald Trump can no longer change the results. What he can try to do is to block the submission of those results to the electoral colleges. That was the first Supreme Court case, when a Republican lawsuit in Pennsylvania wanted to delay the certification until enough votes could be shaved off Biden's lead through multiple recounts, each recount cycle using a different Biden vote filter. Unfortunately, the "case" was a non-starter because it was aborted right at fetal stage by the US Supreme Court refusing to give it due course.

    The nine justices who voted unanimously to throw out the first case did not even bother to explain. There was nothing to explain. Technically, they did not even issue a Decision--only something called a "minute resolution" which was not authored by any justice. It was a single sentence written by a Supreme Court record clerk after reading the minutes of an en banc session wherein one item in the agenda was the nine justices agreeing to toss out the case. That was recorded  in the minutes of the session. So the one-page one-sentence document thwarting the case was just a reporting out of that particular agenda item.

     It would have been more sporting for the Supreme Court to have, at least, said to Trump, "What part of NO don't you understand?"

     Evidently, the Supreme Court must have surmised that Donald Trump's answer even to a rhetorical question like that would have been, "All of it. I don't understand ALL of it."

    This is evident from after being flatly denied his ambition to have multiple-cycle recounts, Donald Trump's think-tank came up with a novel new concept: let's forget recount. Let's just pick the winner from any point along the contest where Donald Trump  was still ahead in the game.  So they sought to have the four states who innovated on their voting procedures to make COVID-19 wary voters avail of mailed-in ballots, in effect,  WAIVE their election. 

    For those who are not lawyers, the best analogy is this: let's say NBA Team One beat NBA Team Two, with the final score being 120-100.  But let's suppose Team One was actually trailing by ten points late in the Third Quarter and only rallied in the Fourth Quarter to win.  Trump's second Supreme Court case is saying, "No, wait, let's proclaim the team that was ahead in the Third Quarter as the Champion!"

By throwing out the election results from the four battleground states because those results were heavily determined by mailed-in ballots--the fourth quarter scoring rally of Joe Biden--Trump wants to be declared winner as of election evening, when less than forty percent of the ballots cast unionwide have been canvassed. 

     Do you know why?

    Donald Trump does. All year long poll after poll have pegged his "base" at less than forty percent of general respondentship. That's  why his consistent approval rating for four years had always been below 35 percent.  This means if he was winning when only less than forty percent of votes have been counted, that's the best it could ever get for him. It can never get any better from there. Stop the counting right there!

    Of course, they didn't stop counting--they couldn't. So when the Biden rally came in the fourth quarter, all Donald Trump could see were torrents of Biden votes, relentlessly coming in wave after wave. He called them "dumps." 

    Game over? Not for Trump! After all, even if a team has won the championship, so long as they have not been handed the trophy, the confetti and colored balloons have not dropped from the ceiling, there is no champion yet. In Trump's mind, if I didn't score more points, I'll shave points from the opponent. If I can't shave points from the opponent, I'll pull the plug from the P.A. system so the results can't be announced. If I can't pull the plug from the P.A. system, I'll try to stop the awarding ceremonies. If I can't stop the awarding ceremonies, I'll tackle the guy bringing the trophy up the stage to the ground...

  So now Donald Trump's coterie of walking brain donors are thinking of resurrecting his "massive electoral fraud" narrative on the floor of Congress when it meets to receive the report of votes from the electoral colleges on January 6, 2021. Again that would be futile because Congress is not an election administering body. It's not even a vote counting body. And it is not an election protest court. All the US Constitution empowers Congress to do is consolidate the reports submitted by the electoral colleges, do a simple arithmetic comparison of the electoral votes received by Donald Trump and Joe Biden and see who got more than 270.

    Donald Trump vowed that he would never concede. Unfortunately, nobody cares if he concedes or not. He lost. He cannot "un-lose" by not conceding.

    What is worrisome is not Donald Trump himself, but the cult of political zombies behind him--the better part of 74-million voters, although it is highly doubtful if the monolith is really that big in practical terms.  The average voter gets back in his or her life the day after the election--it is a scant few who can hold on to their unrighteous indignation for longer than a few days. But even if only 35 percent  of the combined popular vote were to continue to blindly follow Donald Trump, that would still be a mind-boggling number, around 54-million. That number is still more than the population of half the member states of the United Nations. 

     The question then becomes no longer, Can Trump hold on to his so-called "base" but rather would he be bold enough to create a "Trump country" out of it? The spectre of a post-modern secession crisis is the most peacful scenario Americans could hope for. If these 54-million Trump zombies all lived in say ten or so contiguous states, all you have is a clamor for secession. It's a geographical issue, easily solved by military versus militia channeling the historical battles between Union and Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. 

     The problem is, these 54 million are dispersed throughout the 50 states, no doubt more densely in some states than others. But a confrontation between elements of the dispersed 54-million and the rest of the general population would be the TRUE CIVIL WAR in the sense of civilian-versus-civilian. There would be no localized flash points, but a frightening federation-wide free-for-all which could yet be the bloodiest internal conflagration in modern political history.

     And you'd never think it would happen n the United States of America. All it takes is a selfish, narcissistic, sycophant like Donald Trump who has demonstrated that he can short-circuit the normally indomitable instinct of self-preservation and lead millions of Americans literally to their deaths in COVID-19 ignorance.

     If he can lead throngs of Americans to ignore mortal danger and refuse to wear a facemask--and especially be defiantly proud to do it--what can stop him from leading them to internal ideology-less revolt? 

    The most frightening question to ask therefore is, will enough Americans follow Donald Trump to Civil War?

      My answer is YES.Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon

 

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

DIY phenomenon reinventing itself

ot all clowns are shallow. P.T. Barnum, he of Barnum and Bailey circus fame, said the staggeringly candid words, “I don't care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right.”

   Although disputed to some measure, he is also credited with coining the phrase "There's a sucker born every minute."

   Who would think it would be this quintessential clown that would utter words to befuddle political scientists trying to deconstruct this post-modern philosophy of exotic right-wing populism exemplified by ex-US president Donald Trump?

   If you were to summarize the Trumpian political school of thought, these two statements pretty much get the job done. They are not statements of principle. They are statements of mechanics on how to carry out any principle, but especially one that might normally be greeted with scorn or contempt by civil society.

   Donald Trump has discovered--indeed, pretty much invented--the idea that being wrong is nothing to apologize for. In fact, it is productive to wear your mistakes on your sleeve, and to challenge the community norm not for the sake of challenging it per se but with the view to supplanting those norms with his own standards of deviancy.   

   It's a paradox of hypocritical reality that of the many evangelical churches that rabidly support Donald Trump, none of them would vote for him to become senior pastor of their congregation. Only a scant few of them might even embrace him as a regular member. They just want him for the fact that he is their battering ram in advancing religious freedom by doing to society what they don't like society to do to them, namely imposing their own moral and behavioral ethos.

   Donald Trump woke up one morning realizing the same thing, and in multiple applications. Why denounce racism when you can argue that those who call you racist are racists? And just like that you have achieved parity with them. Why express remorse over having a wild orgy with a streetwalker named Desire when you can wink conspicuously in public and remind America the kind of society it mostly is: puritans in public, perverts in private. Fornication is everyone's sin, but so long as he shouts family values and pro-life platitudes, the wool is quickly pulled over everyone's eyes. Have no shame, no sensitivity, no empathy, no love for decency and no regrets about it--only hubris that, in time, enough people would perceive as courage to be "only human" and to be "honest" about it.  Donald Trump discovered that, too: if you are honest about your crime, people no longer see the crime--just the honesty in him owning up to it.

   Take his personal war against "electoral fraud."  What electoral fraud? The one he says exists, whether it can be proven or not. It is not about whether he can prove there was electoral fraud, it's all  about being to make enough people feel that way. The measure by which the conventional conservative American demographic embraces that lie is dumbfounding: over $270-million dollars in donations to his "Electoral Defense Fund." The Trump campaign has collected that much  in less than 30 days since announcing that his "Elite Legal Strike Force"  would clamber  all the way up the US Supreme Court with the simple petition: to overturn the election results--lock, stock and barrel. 

   Forget Joe Biden, he will have the whole US government machinery helping him implement his national reconstruction agenda shortly. What is of greater concern is what the American body politic, always left to its own devices under any admnistration, will do.

   The Republicans have demonstrated they will mostly let the national ballast pull the ship of state level, without effort or intervention--certainly without apology, too. The Democrats are having to contend with the familiar unwieldiness of success having so many fathers. Promising to assemble a Cabinet that would "look like America" Joe Biden is having to placate every under-represented interest group that helped propel him to the Whitehouse. 

 

   In this slightly different fog of war,  Donald Trump is already well ahead in terms of future planning. He has talked about a second presidential run in four years and is looking to lock in his vaunted 74-million voter base. He hopes to   preserve, maybe even grow  his so-called "base" all the way up to November 2024.

   In the first place, having 74-million Americans vote for any candidate is about as meaningful as saying 74-million Americans drink Gatorade, or use Preparation H. It's a snapshot of one day's behavior, not a personal mission statement. Mostly it is Trump's detractors that read too much out of this raw statistic. To be sure, it's not the first time they have done so and in the process revived, or even willed into existence, other groups that were will-o-the-wisps till they found a de-exorcised political body to possess.  Some examples include the Proud Boys, Bikers for Trump, Border Patrol Agents for Trump, Fraternal Order of Police for Trump--and a long list of other groups "for Trump."   

   Trump didn't found any of them, they founded themselves after realizing that Trump may be a swear word in Democratic circles but it's a very fashionable brand.  Your group could be composed of ten aimless sycophants in the fringes, but one mention in a Trump tweet and suddenly your are a local franchise. Reprint the Trump quote on a silkscreened t-shirt, start passing out membership forms and collecting club dues and you're well on your way to being an affiliate group of "the base."

   Trump's tweets are nothing intellectual--or even borderline mature. What makes them earthshaking and consequential is the fact that they are read by 89-million followers. Though the number is falling fast  since he lost the election--and even at its peak ranks far below Barack Obama's 126-million followers--that number does not represent his base.  Judging by the evenly balanced number of likes and hates of his tweets it's logical to assume that the 89-million people who follow Trump on Tweeter represents the combined number of people who follow him out of fealty and those simply curious what outlandish thing he would say next.

   The greatest tragedy is not for Trump to believe his own myth, and to regard his personal legend as a fact, but that his detractors do.  Among Republicans, those facing public reevaluation in the upcoming 2022 midterm elections are wary  of stepping on Trump's toes. They fear his calling down fire and brimstone on their campaign--something he abjectly failed to do against Joe Biden. In other words, Donald Trump is telling his fellow Republicans, what hurt I couldn't inflict on the Democrats I can unleash on you, my fellow Republicans--and they respond by sucking up to him? Isn't life a mystery.

   On the other hand,  the Democrats talk about making the Biden adminstration the "opposite of Trump."  Naivete knows no bounds. What makes them think the Republican-controlled (now, it seems) House would not file an impeachment case against Joe Biden? And if by unfortunate happenstance, the Republicans end up controlling the Senate, that they would not convict Joe Biden out of respect for him not trying to be "like Trump?"

   Ultimately, it will be the American people directly that would have to deal with the Trump phenomenon, if the national consensus was that a return to Trump politics would be anathema to the vision of the Founding Fathers. Just like it took the American people directly to unseat Trump, despite his stranglehold on the workings of Washington's realpolitik.    

   Twitter and Facebook--non-government entities both--have indicated that Donald Trump could lose his social media accounts when he is no longer POTUS. After all, ordinary netizens that flaunt their policies against circulating deceitful material get the axe posthaste.  Without his information umbilical to his base, Trump could no longer keep interest level high on himself and his personal dogma. With receding followership comes donor fatigue. Once the tap dries, Trump's political action committee's self-promoting programs would grind to a halt.

   None of the major traditional news networks (CNN, ABC, NBC, MS-NBC, C-Span) carried  Trump's 46-minute post-defeat delusional rant videotaped without media participation--but it still found accommodation among the far right media Fox News, Newsmax and OAN, along with a motley of smaller garage studios. Now the true reckoning between traditional news organizations and FAKE NEWS  can finally be undertaken in earnest. Now that Trump is no longer president, no longer with a hot line to the heads of the Commerce Department, the IRS, the DOJ and other federal regulators that strike fear in the hearts of the business community, even media advertising will return to the fold of free-enterprise dynamics. Sponsors will advertise in media outfits they feel are legitimate. They don't have to do it anyore to score points with the Whitehouse. Eventually, true costs of operation and true measures of revenue will render fake news operations unviable signalling the renaissance of truth in journalism.

   Because of all of this, Donald Trump and the usual boatload of enabling characters around him are busy trying to reinvent Donald Trump. He needs to go back to "victim status" because overbearing authoritarian doesn't suit him anymore.  But the appeal of appearing to still "call the shots" will be irresistible for him. Look to him to do a parallel of everything Joe Biden does. He will deliver his own "State of the Union" address right after Biden's, maintan an active "press bureau" that will issue statements of him bearing down on every issue that captivates the American attention. In short, from merely fantasizing the concept, Donald Trump will look to literally live the reality of running a "Deep State" from outside the state.

   To do that he needs to push the envelop of what could be lawfully done. He will, no doubt, break rules and ignore sanctions. He never cared for any of that when he was president charged with upholding those rules, why would he care about it now? This is why he talks about pardoning himself by a concept he might end up inventing: pre-emptive pardon.  The US Constitution says that the president is immune from prosecution while in office. The phrase "while in office"  is a very important distinction because it divides time into two phases: a phase when the president could not be charged with a felony, and a phase when he could. If Donald Trump succeeds in inventing the concept of pre-emptive pardon--meaning he can continue to enjoy immunity from prosecution even after he leaves office, he would have amended  the US Constitution as easily as that without even changing a single word in it.

   Unless America catches on, of course. Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon  

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

At last, America decides to stop taking B.S. from Donald Trump

ou can fool some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time. But you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

   It's a hard lesson Donald Trump had to learn the most embarrassing way. He may have been rhetorically right  about him being able to walk out on Fifth Avenue, shooting someone in the head, and still remaining popular to his blindfolded base.  That is hardly inconceivable given that even with over a quarter of a million Americans now dead from COVID-19--victims of  Donald Trump's utter stupidity in his pandemic non-response--he still managed to tally 74 million votes. That number is miniscule only if you compare it  against Joe Biden's 80 million votes (and counting).

   But he was dead wrong in believing his luck will never run out. What goes around comes around, eventually. In Trump's case, it just happened that adjustment unavoidably takes time. The US government is such a complex apparatus, and the American Constitution such a cumbersome manual of principles, that the response to someone like Donald Trump rising to become President  takes place at geologic pace. But even the most exploitable and tolerant of systems has a breaking point, a pivot point for redemption.

   In a real sense, the presidency is mostly a titular office--like being captain of a large ship. The captain's orders are always followed, but are executed by a long chain of command. When he commands the ship to stop, it triggers  a dizzying flurry of activities: engineers cutting forward thrust, others engaging reverse thrust, the helmsman steering the ship to hold course, someone dropping the anchor, and a host of other steps. By the time  the ship is sitting dead calm in still waters, it would still have traveled a considerable length between the giving of the order and its final compliance.  That just happens to be how the system works. The captain does not directly control the ship. He merely controls the crew that runs the ship. 

   Heaven forbid the captain should go mad, begin barking orders that don't make sense, or even put the ship and crew in harm's way. Looking at one another totally aghast at the evident display of amok, the hapless crew are bound by the impulse against mutiny deeply etched into their brains. Many  would suppose that as long as the ship remains seaworthy, is not taking in seawater, not about to run aground or crash into the rocky shores, they would stick by the orders of their skipper--giving him furloughs of benefit of the doubt. It's captain's madness aside, that ship will make it to safe harbor somehow but only because its crew know how to sail home, captain or no captain.

   Donald Trump spent the last four years being Captain Ahab pursuing his whale Moby Dick--the singular focus on keeping his power at all costs. He knows that even if he caught the Dick, it was bigger than his boat and its sinking a foregone conclusion. But he couldn't care less. He will have his Dick, if everybody else has to swim back to land.

   Finally, on November 3, 2020, America's sufferance under a mad President came to an end. American voters can finally reboard the ship of state and assess the damage wrought upon it by Captain Trump.  What awaits their inspection is not a pretty sight.

   Donald Trump has all but destroyed the US two-party system. He was going for an entranced monolithic society where the populace is given no choice but to obey his idiotic ideas or be thrown overboard as chum to a swirling frenzy of feeding sharks. He is totally ignorant about the workings of government and the civil service, treating federal offices as implementing units of the great Trump Ambition. Everybody works for him, not for the government. He  works for himself, certainly not for the American people--not even for his support base. No one has done any counting but given that the Trump school of thought is to just let a pandemic wear itself out, with nobody having to bother to take any precautionary measures, more COVID-19 fatalities probably come from the ranks of his mindless supporters.

   Whenever the vote tally showed him losing a state--like Georgia, for example--all the people in that state suddenly become Democrats and disloyal Republicans actually in bed with Democrats all along. He sees no party lines--it's just him against everybody else he considers "enemy of the people"--with "people" defined as "Donald Trump."

   As an outsider looking in, I've often wondered in the last four years, just how much of this B.S. are the American people really capable of putting up with? Is the American people's tolerance for utter mediocrity really that bottomless?

   Donald Trump has completely defunctionalized the US Congress, especially the Republican-led Senate.  Meant by the US Constitution to be a co-equal branch of the Executive, instead Donald Trump has relegated the US Senate as his rear guard. Every time the Democrat-led House conducts an investigation tending to expose corruption and wrongdoing by the Trump administration, a parallel Senate investigation tailor-fit to reverse every one of its findings is never far behind. The Senate most famously exonerated Trump without even allowing key witnesses just to spite the House which impeached Donald Trump with full evidence earlier. The Whitehouse threw a monkey wrench at every critical step of the proceeding, overreachingly invoking executive privilege to clamp down on the testimony of people who did not even belong to the executive department.  Every guard rail installed by the Constitution to preclude executive abuse was dismantled by Donald Trump. He stopped any probe into anomalies into his administration by knee-capping the discovery mechanism in the first place, firing Inspector Generals left and right.  When he couldn't ferret out the whistleblower that called out his quid-pro-quo phone call to the Ukrainian president, he branded the entire support personnel of the West Wing as a cabal of leakers--or worse the clandestine appendages of a "deep state" conspiracy out to get him. It wasn't enough that he fired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman for telling on the creative lies Trump cleaners had woven into telephone conversation transcript, the patriot--and his brother--needed to be bodily thrown out of the workplace, escorted out of the Whitehouse  by Secret Service bodyguards.

   The Black Lives Matter upheaval over the streetstyle execution of George Floyd via a cop's knee pressed on the jugular vein of his neck wasn't seen by Trump as a cause for outrage. He saw it as a much needed boost to energizing his racist base, as well as endearing himself some more with his evangelical supporters applauding his holding a bible upside down in a post-protest breakup photo-op.

Do Americans really approve of those actions by their president?

   Evidently they don't but there's little--in fact nothing--they could do in the short daily cycle of these non-stop acts of presidential assault on constitutional and human rights. The reckoning would have to await an appointed time when accountability could speak with one nationally-synchronized voice: the elections.

   In daily buckets of lies and falsehoods, Donald Trump kept the public entranced, fact checkers always a step behind. The linearity of history is on Donald Trump's side. Nobody can call out his error until after he has committed them, by which time he can drown out one error by a more egregious subsequent one.  No one could predict what his next lie or falsehood would be.

    Elections are the internodes between presidential terms. Voters can only know if their choice was wrong by suffering what their wrong choice says and does in the ensuing four years. Then hindsight comes into advantage. The advantage of reckoning a re-electionist is that his ways and thoughts are nio longer a mystery. By the time he sought a second term, Donald Trump could no longer ask the American people to invest in him by faith--other than his frustrated evangelical supporters who have completely lost touch with God--they know him in fact.

    The American people may not be able to predict what Donald Trump's next lies will be. But at re-election time, they can certainly prevent him him from making any more.  Last November 3rd, the American people simply said they've had it, and they're not taking bovine defecatory output anymore from this, the worst US President in history thus far.Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

The more dangerous Trump: his reincarnation

he profound damage that Donald Trump did to American democracy cannot be overstated. In a four-year blitzkrieg of certifiable insanity, he managed to rewrite the whole book on American politics and government it's  a wonder the United States isn't a failed state yet.

The specific things that he did to destroy democratic institutions and processes are too numerous to enumerate. But one common thread runs through all of them in that Donald Trump did all those horrendous things by just one modus operandi: ignore the rule of law.

   By his account, Donald Trump accomplished everything he set out to do--and in a sense he is correct. If the definition of an accomplished task is hitting the "bullseye" he hit the centre point each and every time. But the way he did it is not by throwing the dart skillfully enough to stick it in the middle of the board. What he does is throw darts at random and then draw the target board around where each dart hit. He couldn't miss.

   Donald Trump's objectives are not the objectives of everyone else. When he wouldn't disavow racist and white supremacist advocacies, people warned that he was gaslighting the supposedly dying embers of systemic discrimination. A failure by many accounts, but not to him. He was trying to do exactly what everyone else was warning against. He wanted to rekindle intolerance because intolerant demogaphics are a peculiar, if bizarre, support niche he alone cared to cultivate. It was "THE BASE" to him.

   There are ominous storm clouds in the horizon too. The triumph of Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential elections is an imposed self-reflection on America's own self. Trump may have lost but he still garnered over 71 million votes--bested only by Biden's 75 million. It's clear America remains sharply divided and it was a shocking eye-opener for many Americans to witness political nobility beat mediocrity in a down-the-wire photofinish. America now must look at herself in the mirror, see almost half her face covered with warts and then accept the reality that it is what America actually looks like. There is no denying it even if, for the moment, the prospects for better days look bright.

   Smarting from the experience, Americans dread the idea of a Donald Trump comeback run in 2024--and will probably work feverishly the next four years sandbagging against that possibility. 

   That would be a mistake--a failure to recognize what the real danger is simply because you were anticipating its renaissance in familiar form. 

   Such as he is, Donald trump is not a unique pariah.  He is a type--a reusable template for anyone to repackage and repurpose for their own present and future bid to go even farther than Donald Trump did. 

   There's a reason why everything a US president says and does matters. It matters because it sets the limit of what a US president can say and do.  Whether he sets the bar high or low, he justifies his successor going as high and as low at minimum--with the opportunity to push the envelop as farther out until public pushback stops him cold.

   But there's an added element of danger: a second incarnation of Donald Trump could come in a prettier package. Imagine everything reprehensible about Trump being woven into the spellbinding charisma of an articulate orator, for example. The problem with Trump is that when he was told by statisticians he was polling poorly among suburban women, the next day he goes out to the podium, spreads his arms wide open and cries, "Suburban women, please like me!" A more gifted charlatan could deliver the message with more finesse and quaintly-faked empathy he would win the vote not only of the suburban woman but her entire family's as well. . 

   And then there's a second layer to this element of danger. This means you don't have to act like Donald Trump to be Donald Trump. You just have to think like him, and go with your own well-liked and well-received public persona. You don't have to say, after a Ku Klux Klan or a neo-Nazi rally is broken up by police, that in the widening national dialogue about racism "there are fine people on both sides."  You might say, instead, that the "national effort to eradicate intolerance follows a universal objective that appeals to all."  Same message but kinder-sounding. After all, when you say that tribalism is universal, you make tribalism the virtue in and of itself. That does not advance the cause of healing and uniting a deeply fractured society.

   One sector that Trumpism really damaged deeply is the evangelical church community, already hobbled by a whole range of sub-doctrinal differences as it is. The debate on whether or not to support Donald Trump channeled the Reformation Era schism  between believers who subscribed to the doctrine of salvation by irresistible grace alone, and those who embraced salvation through the cooperation of divine grace and human obedience. 

   The church clearly got it wrong, in endorsing the blatantly un-Christian Trump--even if you pile up all the "good works" he has supposedly done for the church (not even for God). If love and adulation to a political leader were the measure of heaven's approval, North Korea's Kim Jong Il ought to be beatified. And if sexual perversion such as Trump is legendary for is only the precursor of a life destined to be ultimately repurposed for God's glory, then let's go easy on all those pedophiles in frocks up and down the Vatican hierarchy. Shall we say these priests sodomized little altar boys so that in their public repentance, people would praise the God they betrayed?  With Christians believing that, who needs atheists? Incidentally, Joe Biden is Roman Catholic and he seems to be standing up for God more than many reformist congregation members worming their way through the thickness of Trump's "Make America Great Again" rallies.

   Donald Trump once pointed out to a black man in one of his rallies, referring to him as "my African-American"--he forgot to add "slave."  It was a masterful stroke of public relations to have Kanye West call on Trump at the Whitehouse and declare to the 'hood that Trump was his superhero.  They even tried to put Kanye West on the ballot to try to draw votes away from Biden who wouldn't otherwise vote for Trump anyway. Of course state election officials nixed the idea all across the continent, you'd think Kanye West would at least land a "Plan B" role as campaign curtain-raiser and crowd drawer. He would have been the focus of the rally, something  Trump cannot endure.

   But what if a second Donald Trump were to emerge who could actually shoot a basketball? Or deliver a few lines of rap?  Compared to the unsubtle tricks and antics of Donald Classic, this guy would be a hit.  That's because Donald Trump rewrote the rule on character: you don't have to stand firmly for one thing, you just need to know how to stand loosely for everything.

   Politics is addition. This used to mean that those who aspire for public office must face a nation, bare his soul, declare his life principles and obtain public approval by the number of people who join him. Donald Trump rewrote it so that a politician must plunge headlong into any group, declare that he stands by whatever they stand for, and would they add their number to his base?

    The way he did it grossed out many people. So now the new holy grail of obtaining the skill behind the "Art of the Deal" is who can be Donald Trump the most while seeming like him the least. That heralds the coming of the Second Donald Trump. Here's hoping even the church gets it right next time. Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

The slam dunk win that Trump squandered

onald Trump could be the 46th president of the United States right now if he had not  squandered a golden opportunity to score a "slam dunk" victory in the 2020 presidential elections.

   He performed creditably well, despite running with an engine that wasn't firing on all pistons. From the outset, this was his election to lose. He is the incumbent with a solid base of supporters uniformly afflicted with tunnel vision that he could literally pied piper them off any cliff any day--and twice on Sundays.  Every  time he snaps the order to "Jump!" they all chorus back "HOW HIGH?!"  His rallies served no purpose of consolidating their support for him. Those rallies were only meant to help him sustain an egomaniac 'high' because, without it and with his campaign's donation tank on warning-light empty, he was literally chugging the last miles of the homestretch on fumes.

   For his target audience, he had the right idea of projecting himself  "working his ass off."  The average rural and suburban (and not a few cosmopolitan) American loves that Sly Stallone "Rocky" warrior complex, driven by the hypermantra to  floor  the gas, put the pedal to the metal, leave nothing to chance, take no prisoners, live or die like there's no tomorrow. What else would explain his penchant for COVID19-oblivious  mass gatherings where one person inhales what the person next to him exhales? 

   His speeches are such an interesting study, I should make it my students' midterm thesis assignment in political science. They are  Germanic Hitler in structure, using the so-called "call-and-response" format. He says "Your Governor should open up your state, her quarantine restrictions are killing you!" and his audience cry in unison,"Lock her up! Lock her up!"  repeatedly in rising crescendo. He says, "Dr. Anthony Fauci, he's been around 500 years, but he's wrong a lot" and the bleachers resonate with "Fah-yer Fauci!  Fah-yer Fauci!"  

   This is not an original Hitler concept, by the way, he copied it from an observation he made while attending mass at a church in Berlin where the priest and the congregation engaged in a similar "call-and-response" public reading of scripture referred to as "responsorial psalms." Hitler noticed that a core stimulating message could be used to elicit a programmed response that erased any distinction between the engaged and the inattentive. The whole audience to the last man, always answered in one voice unthinkingly and without resistance. Hitler corrupted the concept that Trump (or, I suspect, some obscure scholarly adviser) learned from on how to serve up his shallow message and draw an almost Pavlovian response. "Here, I'll ring the dinner bell and you all salivate at the same time, okay? All together now..."

   With that simple delivery method, Donald Trump could make his audience swallow the lumpiest messages. I'm the greatest. I alone can solve the problem. I will drain the swamp. Protesters are looters. I know more than the generals. It's a long litany of self-actualized grandstanding platitudes--each one a distinct "call" to which the "responsorial psalm" reply was, "Four more years! Four more years!"

   There's only one problem with this kind of scorched-earth fighting message: he was preaching to the choir--no offense to the thoroughly-confused WASP (white Angle-Saxon Protestant) churches that also kept in step with Trump's Apocalypse Now marshall drumbeat. But to win reelection,  what he needed to reach was the complementary demographic who represent the opposites to his 42% approval rating.  

   There's a reason why Donald Trump couldn't bring himself to denounce white supremacists, neo-Nazi's, QAnon conspiracy theory spinners and gun-toting NRA members. They are loyal to him. Loyalty eats its own children.  If he acted with genuine statesmanship and put down these wayward advocates of violence, he risked losing their support in exchange for the uncertain gamble of maybe  endearing himself to decent society. It's a plus-potential minus-certainty formula he couldn't live with. Literally speaking, he was trapped with no means of escape. He couldn't extract himself from their midst because he was their vortex.

   Suddenly, out of China from whence all good things come, fate gifted Donald Trump with a golden ticket to re-election: the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.  His initial response suggested that he didn't "get it." He did not realize that a pandemic is a protracted disaster that will grip America's undivided attention, and continually beg of dashing images of heroes--and not even unsung ones but screaming their tonsils out. 

   What makes little boys dream of becoming policemen, firemen or soldiers is not the fancy uniforms. It's the drama of  firemen hanging from the back of a wailing red truck passing through in a flash to dive into a giant fire somewhere. It's the moving image of soldiers bristling with guns and grenades shooting at enemies they can't even see. Doctors in neat white lab gowns holding stethoscopes are unimpressive. It's the ones in the green pajamas wielding scalpels hunkered over an operating table that fires the imagination.  The COVID-19 pandemic was a chance served on a silver platter (or petri dish) for Donald Trump to be engaged in heroic action that he didn't even have to fake.

   Donald Trump only had to act the role of COVID-19 fighter and he could have held the entire nation in bated breath, hanging on to every word that spews from his mealy mouth. He didn't even need to understand everything he says. He just needed to moan painfully for the nation. The government is a well-oiled apparatus that actually runs on autopilot the whole time. The system will clean up after him and take care of the nitty gritty details of a system-wide pandemic response.  

   After a while, when he said he considered himself a "wartime president" I was sure he finally got it. I doubt that he came up with that phrase. It was coined by some Whitehouse advisers who forgot the most important thing: they needed to define "wartime president" to him, and not let him inject his own meaning into it. 

   Donald Trump understands only one meaning of war: it's every conflict he can imagine that pits  him against the rest of the world. War to him is any competition where anybody tries to outshine him. He could not fight a military war because he couldn't stand the idea of having to follow strategy mapped out by generals. That makes the generals smarter than him. A strict no-no. That's  why he completely shunned the COVID-19 war because Dr. Anthony Fauci was making him look like a spectator.  

   What a difference a little adjustment could have made. All he needed to do was to reverse his tack. Instead of projecting strength, dominance, total grasp, full control and almost narcotic optimism, he would have gained better traction channeling besiegement and reprising endless "calls" for public support. He needed to look like he is leading the fight for the people, and he needed to look losing not winning the fight. He needed to look painfully overmatched by the microscopic enemy, but he needed to show his head bloodied yet unbowed.  

   "Superman" heads of state who project needlessness do not rekindle patriotism. It is the unrelenting champions of the people who are taking a beating while holding the line as hard as they can, for as long as they can, while issuing rallying calls for civic activation--those are the WInston Churchhills, Harry Trumans, Richard the lionhearted and the Joan of Arcs of mythical lore that people respond to.

   He got a second chance when he tested positive for COVID-19. But apart from the perfunctory "Been there, done that, I feel your pain" message that he only used once or twice, Donald Trump demonstrated that he still didn't get it. His machismo got the better of him, telling both the virus and America, "In your face! I beat this virus by myself. I didn't need anybody's help!"  His self-promoting instinct told him to pander to widespread fear and anxiety and offer himself as the savior come in the flesh, but he just could not bend a knee to lower himself where he could have rallied the people to boost him up.  He was messianic, but no, he wasn't Mister Nice Guy--a most succinct oxymoron, if there ever was one.  He wanted to play messiah but only knew how to act pariah.

   Well, not only did he lose to coronavirus, he lost the presidency. But now at least he can say he has stumbled upon the vaccine against winning. Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon  

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

How did the church get this one wrong?

n the eve of the US presidential elections, I found myself wading through a flood of emails, forwarded video clips, letters, and other internet flotsam in my inbox. These came from friends, relatives, former schoolmates, or just total strangers  from different places around the world but mostly from North America--the United States and Canada. They are reacting to several articles I wrote in this blog which they suggested were "leaning towards endorsing Joe Biden."

   First of all, I am not even an American citizen. I will not vote this November 3rd. In fact, I am not even in the United States. I don't belong to the Democratic Party and I don't know Joe Biden personally. He certainly doesn't know me. In short, I have no stake in the outcome of this elections. I am just one political observer taking advantage of technology that makes it possible now to participate in a global dialogue on everything from global warming to the hundred ways you can recycle a soda can.

   Secondly, US politics are not an exclusively American domestic subject. US foreign policy impacts the rest of the world, including the region where I live. The direction of policy is determined by who's in the Whitehouse. Policy is the result of building consensus among opposing interests looking to that policy for advantage or exception. On a practical level, policy depends in large part on who sits behind the huge desk in the Oval Office. And that, in turn,   is the collective result of the American electoral behavior. So it cannot be avoided that in myriad ways fair and foul, the rest of the global community will look to influence the behavior of the American electorate by helping shape the landscape of universal opinion that they know the American voter is sensitive to. On second thought, I along with the rest of the world, am just as invested in the US presidency and in contributing to the vetting factors that lead to that choice.

   Thirdly, it's my failing to have created only the impression that I was leaning towards Joe Biden. I should have just come clean and said it plain and simple that  I am for Joe Biden for reasons that are not entirely American. 

   I am also an evangelical Christian--a born-again believer in Jesus Christ. Like all doctrinaire believers, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ for the bible declares it is the power of God unto salvation for all men. I don't claim any prophetic anointing or oracle powers of any kind. I only believe in the relevance of the scriptures and in the duty of every Christian to speak out on matters that touch on biblical principles to declare the glory of God in the secular arena of post-modern politics--even at the risk of being wrong. 

   I disagree with the position of some Christian ministries in the US--mostly those in the so-called "bible belt" of the American midwest and deep south--who vigorously support Donald Trump as the "Anointed One" of God. To be fair, it is not the Christian church that made such declaration. It was Trump himself but without any significant objection from the church. It is also not the first superlative claim that he has made for himself. He unabashedly calls himself the greatest US president ever, the one who has done the most for the African-American community with the only "possible exception" of Abraham Lincoln.  He seriously believes he deserves to the the fifth head on the granite cliffsides of Mount Rushmore. He brags about building--or at least aspiring to build--a border wall that is longer than the Tower of Babel is tall. 

   He is a man full of flaws, errors and contradictions--and that is putting it kindly. But the enthusiastic Christian supporter of Donald Trump is quick to point out that Christianity is not about being good.  It is about acknowledging that no one is good and that the fallen nature of man renders him predisposed to doing evil. Man cannot, by his own puny efforts, divorce himself from his reprobate nature. It requires the gracious intervention of a compassionate and forgiving God to cleanse unholy man. Then with the sanctifying work of His Holy Spirit, God can repurpose the life of a redeemed sinner to become, among other possibilities, a vessel of godly agenda for civil government. Therefore, when a man like Donald Trump is "raised by God" the people of God must be quick to recognize and set aside the seeming incongruence between the anointing and the man's character. Not only can God utilize even an evil man, in fact evil men are all the material God has to work with in this fallen world. So the church must demonstrate its faith in God by accepting His will--even if it comes in the unpalatable form of Donald Trump. Failing to do that is flying in the face of God's sovereignty  and a rebellious declination to submit to His all-encompassing lordship.

   All that explanation is needed just to clarify the statement that "Christianity if not about being good."

   But if you state the opposite--"Christianity is about being evil"--the self-contradiction is all at once self-evident that any explanation is totally unnecessary. The statement simply won't fly. You should not try to justify it, because you can't.  This time it flies in the face of the nature of God Himself.

   For centuries theologians have debated the answer to the question, "Can God create a rock so large that He cannot lift it?" If the premise is that nothing is impossible with God, then you must grant that He can indeed create a rock of any size. But based on the same premise, you have to grant that He can lift it--which means He didn't do a good job creating the rock in the first place. His nature in the second act contradicts His nature in the first act. 

   In truth, that question cannot be answered because it cannot even be asked. It's not a question of impossibility but of validity of premise. It is not true that nothing is impossible to God. Yes, there are any number of things God cannot do. God cannot do anything that would deny His nature. God cannot lie, God cannot die, God cannot reproduce Himself, God cannot cease being God. This is why God, being the sum total of all universal good, can never be evil. God cannot stand for both good and evil. He cannot stand for evil, period.

   But it has been lovingly pointed out to me by brothers and sisters in the faith that Donald Trump may be all rough and tumble outside, but is godly soft and chewy inside. Never mind that he held a bible upside down for a photo-op, relegating the object representation of God's Word to the status of a talisman, an amulet of superstition. He couldn't quote a verse of scripture if his life depended on it. The Word of God is not on his lips because it is not in his heart. But then, again, the argument comes forth that God will often use the "humble things of this world to shame the wise."  Jesus said whatsoever you do to the least of your brothers, that you do unto him. In other words, don't jump to conclusions when you see the outward appearance of an unworthy person. If you reject someone because you think he is unworthy you could be rejecting the embodiment of Christ without even knowing it.  For all you know, the unworthy-appearing person is actually God-sent. God just packaged him that way--later God will guide His people through revelation to recognize the servant he sends forth among them.

   You see, again, all that explanation is needed just to explain the idea that God might use an unlikely candidate as His vessel.

   The God I serve didn't give me the power to judge another man, that he may either enter heaven or be cast into hell. God gave me--and all Christians--wisdom not to be used to judge the eternal destiny of men. That wisdom is to be used to help me navigate the labyrinths of temporal life--because, in the meantime, that is the life He has given me to function with in this fallen world. 

   If God chooses to raise a leader of men, He will not--in denial of His nature--use any kind of deceptive or misleading packaging. The revelation that Christian orthodoxy talks about as the mechanics by which God influences human decision making is revelation that is reserved for the purpose of understanding God himself. To direct the temporal affairs of God's people in the Old Testament, God was not vague. He was not mysterious, he was not suggestive. He was blatant.

   He did not give three million Israelites wandering the vastness of the Sinai desert navigational revelation. He simply told them follow the pillar of fire by night, and the pillar of smoke by day.

   I've listened to Donald Trump all throughout the campaign, I have never heard him say one biblical thing. Saying "Jesus is popular in America" is not a spiritual achievement. It is just dumbing down the obvious. What I have heard from him plenty is how he promises to make America wealthy again--and he leaves no room for misinterpretation that by "wealthy" he means material fortunes, in the framework of jobs, tax rebates, trade advantage, the stock market, arms sales, snatching the commercial success of TikTok and other tell-tale signs of material prosperity.

   It is no wonder many of the ministries that support Donald Trump are some of the same controversial churches--of contentious stature within the Body of Christ itself--that espouse the so-called Prosperity Gospel.  This is the unvarnished preaching of the idea that God meant for Christians to never experience poverty, and doing so to regard it as a sign of disfavor from which deliverance must be sought.

   Many Christians have pointed out to me that Donald Trump has appointed conservative justices to the US Supreme Court. Enough of them already, in fact, that the reversal of Roe vs. Wade is a foregone conclusion. Soon enough, but not too long from now, abortion would be illegal again across all fifty states.

   Abortion is murder. From the very first time the crime was committed by Cain, God had always disapproved of it, God never lifted the  mark of Cain from the collective brow of the entire human race. The reversal of Roe vs. Wade will not set things right for the unborn child in the womb of its mother on her way to an abortion clinic. That child died in the heart of its mother from the time she became aware of her pregnancy. The abortion clinic is only where she goes to bury the fetus. If the Christian church will look to policing hospitals and clinics to stop the unbridled killing of innocent unborns, the battle is already lost.  If it puts its trust on legislation and criminal penalties to coerce society into respecting the sanctity of human life, it abdicates its whole duty to respond to God's call for His law to be written on tablets of human hearts--and not in volumes of congressional bills.

   If the church cannot imbue the pro-life value of God's kingdom in the hearts of men and women, even nine pro-life justices in the US Supreme Court--the entire bench--cannot stop abortion. It is not a legal issue. It is an issue of the heart. The agencies of government cannot compensate for the failure of family and religious institutions in propagating the Christian value and ethical systems.

   On the other hand, I hear only Joe Biden trying his best to refocus America to the womb of its inception--the godly founding of America as the world's beacon of faith, hope and restoration. He cries that this election is about a battle for the soul of the nation. 

   The Christian evangelical church rejects that call by rejecting the man through whom God channels the blatant message. They prefer the biblical contortionism needed to rationalize their support for Donald Trump--who is blatant about his total lack of understanding of the will of God. 

   Between Donald Trump who panders to the church by giving in to all their political and material demands, and Joe Biden who appeals to godly conscience and calls on America to rededicate itself to the original ideals of the Christian Founding Fathers, the evangelical church in America threw their support behind the man-pleasing Trump.  The human leaders of the church are simply wrong on this one, there is simply no more polite way to say it.

   I considered delaying writing this piece--what if Donald Trump wins? But if I delayed this, if I refused to go out on a limb and call out the error of the evangelical church in America, then I'm just waiting for the last touchdown in Sunday's football game so I could describe it accurately on Monday morning.  

   I believe that if Donald Trump loses, the people of God who did not bear witness to him being anointed will be vindicated. But if he wins, it will not change the fact that Donald Trump still does not mirror much of God's righteous standard. And this is the crux of the matter:  God expects His people to submit to the civil government he will head anyway. This is the counter-intuitive wisdom that evangelical America pre-empted. It's not that God will test if people will support a man He did  not anoint. It is more likely that God wants to see who would continue to submit to the civil government institution that He anointed, even if its reigns were usurped by the most generic sinner.  The obedience is not demonstrated before the elections--or even in intervention of it--when its possible result is in the hands of man. It comes after the elections when results can no longer be changed--and the destiny of the nation is in the hands of God--Donald Trump or no Donald Trump.Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon 

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

The millstone around Joe Biden's neck

t is barely four days to the US presidential elections on November 3, 2020. Still the most prudent assessment among many political observers is that the contest remains an unpredictable toss-up.

   Polls, at least the conventionally trustworthy ones, have Joe Biden leading Donald Trump in gaps larger than the margin of error. But statistics, as they say, are like a string bikini: it reveals the suggestive by concealing the vital.  The polls are a sampling of national sentiment and are not very accurate barometers of local voting predisposition. Unfortunately, all politics is local.  The US president is not elected at large, but by majority proportional representation--the electoral college system. Getting the biggest number of votes does not guarantee victory. Getting the widest geographic support does. Loosely speaking, a candidate must look to win more states, not more votes.  

   It's kind of like the Olympics. Even a small nation with only 50 athletes, each one competing in one event, can become overall champion against countries with huge thousand-man delegations competing in the same events if the athletes from the smaller nation win more events.  It's not about how many and how noisy your group is, it's how many medals you total up at the end of the races.

   It's even much trickier in politics. There is usually no universal issue that swings voting opinion uniformly across all fifty states. Even so, candidates never give up trying to  define and campaign by those elusive universal issues--Joe Biden does. If you listen to Biden, he paints a panoramic canvas, using broad brush strokes. He talks about fighting for the "soul of the nation" and "vindicating the spirit of America" and appealing to moralists to anchor their reckoning on the "character of the man."  He then invites comparison between him and Trump on those terms. 

   Donald Trump, in contrast, is happy as a clam just scaring the bejezus out of rural yokels over waning industries and vanishing jobs. Don't look now but Biden's motherhood platitudes are slowly fading behind Trump's frantic wolf-crying. It's not about elegance and class but whatever slogan works best.  The sad reality is that the  average man on the street gets his opinion from the bumper sticker with the brightest colors. 

   I do think Joe Biden is more likeable, just watching Donald Trump strutting about with his goofy antics makes your skin crawl. But that's not about character. It's just photogenic-telegenic-cybergenic value, that's all.

   What's dangerous is that beneath this thin veneer of endearment, there are some serious questions about Joe Biden's character too that have somehow escaped close scrutiny--either by purpose or  lucky happenstance.

   I expected the Republicans to pound Joe Biden hard on the questionable affairs of his son Hunter Biden. But they let him off the hook, I think,  because they're just too busy or tired  to sink their teeth into the details. They stopped at the general portrayal of sordidness, but didn't have the time or the inclination to indict Hunter Biden before the bar of public opinion.

   Worse, they oversimplified it. If you didn't research any deeper, you'd think Hunter Biden was some drug-dependent teenage bum dropped out of school, hanging by Daddy's coattails, landing cushy jobs way above his skillset level and riding a golden parachute to early retirement.

  Not exactly so. The man is a fullfledged lawyer--not a high school dropout. He served a full five-year term (not a scandal-abbreviated one) in the board of directors of Burisma, Inc. a private energy development company (not a Ukrainian state corporation). About the most eyebrow-raising thing about that whole situation is he happens to be the son of the US Vice president Joe Biden at the time. So the potential for influence-peddling was certainly there.

   But there wasn't any earthshaking outrage about it, except among a limited circle of ovethinking Republican strategists who, try as they did, simply couldn't package the whole thing as a sensational-enough scandal.

  Back in the halcyon days of nobler politics in America, this could have been enough to trigger at least a 500-word article in the New York Times, or an episode of 60 Minutes. That's because in that genteel era of propriety in public office, the existence of actual corruption is not required. Even the mere whiff or suggestion of wrongdoing is enough to draw widespread public contempt. 

   That onion-skin criteria for public disdain is gone, in no small measure thanks to Donald Trump himself. ln fact, for a long time to come in US government, I suspect many US presidents will be able to get away with a million things short of murder. Just because the 45th president did horrendously worse before them.

   Just the same, I think Hunter Biden--who served in Burisma's board from 2014 to 2019 (April) could have done better.  If he thought there was nothing improper with him working for a company with no business dealings with the American government, he should have seized the initiative to claim high ground. He should have made his exit from Burisma much louder and blatant, inviting rather than deflecting attention from it.  He didn't, he opted to slowly fade away from public view--no doubt upon the advise of Democrat strategists applying "less talk, less mistake; no talk no mistake." But he left behind a telling confession that even he believed his surname "Biden" was all the Burisma stockholders read off his resumé to bequeath him with a US$50,000 monthly paying job just doing basically one thing: being Biden.  You'd think Hunter could have said something--anything--to assuage the ethical community that he didn't draw pay as a wallflower. But he kept mum. 

   On a limited scale, playing possum was a successful strategy because it deprived Donald Trump of a piñata he could have been whacking all throughout  the campaign. That successfully diminished the attraction value of corruption as an issue against Joe Biden. He had a choice between telling his son to man up and explain, or to shut up and don't rock the boat. He preferred the latter. That is character clue right there.

   On the other hand, it could be that Americans, in general, couldn't care less about a less-than-shocking involvement of a non-government official (Hunter Biden held no public office) in a non-transaction that involved no American taxpayer dollar. In 1984, Ron Reagan--son of US President Ronald Reagan--appeared in a TV commercial endorsing the American Express credit card company. People thought it was cute, certainly not outrageous. Even today, Donald Trump makes no effort to ensure that  the involvement of Ivanka, Eric and Donald, Jr. in state affairs is discrete or even nondescript.

   By and large that's the real reason why the Hunter Biden non-exposé simply couldn't get much traction even among the most cynical pundits. With Donald Trump hurling all the mud, it's simply too much of a teapot calling the kettle blacker. 

   But having said that, Hunter Biden would continue to attract controversy in a Joe Biden administration.  The question used to be what was Hunter Biden's lobbying hitch on his father (the vice-president) for a company he is actually connected with?

   Now it will be what is Hunter Biden's lobbying hitch with his father, the President, for all companies (not just Burisma) whose connections with him are now invisible? That creates a dilemma for Joe Biden. If he hearkens to his own moral standards of principled politics, he must not appoint Hunter Biden to any government position, certainly not a position in his cabinet.  But that keeps Hunter Biden an undeniably well-connected lobbyist lurking in the shadows, unaccountable to no one.  

   Presidential children in contemporary times are always a tough challenge to handle. Barack and Michele Obama managed to keep Sasha and Maliya out of the political crosshairs by talking little about them. Doing even better, Bill and Hilllary Clinton shielded Chelsea from public view so jealously she was Washington's fleeting unicorn, hardly even seen by anyone.  Hunter Biden has a shot to be Joe Biden's mythical Yeti, the Bigfoot--except everybody with a big bore rifle goes out of his way to try catch the poor thing. Hunter will find himself the hunted all throughout Daddy's term. And Daddy will always think of him as the millstone around his neck he simply can't get rid of.Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON