Are things as bad as they seem?

May 2026.  Observations

People are thinking that Trump has lost his way. But that does not seem possible, because he never found it in the first place. For someone with his keen political instincts, it strikes me as not unusual that he has no moral compass, because voters either do not care or care only about themselves. This has been true many times throughout our history, but moral leadership, or at least a modicum of it, has existed to some extent among the elites.

If it is true that leaders do not possess some element of decency and respect for their countrymen, then we are doomed to fail. It almost seems that we are on the cusp of that, if one looks around. But maybe not. Even a crook makes some correct decisions. After all, Nixon went to China. Trump may solve part of the Middle East problem while he screws everything else up domestically.

American history teaches us that there have been moral lapses before: presidents who presided over the killing of Native Americans, who were segregationists, who were racists, who were slaveowners, who catered to robber barons. There were titans who built the railroads, cornered the oil markets, burned down their competitors, shot strikers — but often these lapses were followed by reform movements. Hopefully that will happen again after this dark chapter of corruption returns permanently to Mar-a-Lago or to Leavenworth. I believe the American voter will wake up from this nightmare.

Jill Lepore, the Harvard historian, has just written a new book, We the People, the premise of which is that the Constitution needs to be amended from time to time, and that the difficulty of amending it has thrown a monkey wrench into not only the efficiency, but more importantly, the fairness by which we govern ourselves.

A number of things must be done — the discarding of the Electoral College, and the direct election of the President of the United States. One person, one vote. One methodology would be awarding each state’s electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, thereby avoiding the necessity of a national recount if there is controversy.

Next, proportioning the Senate more in line with population without abolishing the influence of each state — perhaps by adding senators in tiers and capping representation at six per state, so that the Senate does not simply become another House. Or alternatively, leaving the Senate alone but increasing the size of the House to create more equal representation. And stop gerrymandering through national legislation.  Moreover, institutions and lawmakers are not keeping up with vast technological change and upheaval.

Unfortunately, the conservative elements of society have vested interests in keeping things the way they are, even if that includes massive wealth inequality, raging corporate profits, and increasingly desperate economic conditions for the working class, soon to be run off the road by robots, literally and figuratively.

60 Minutes ran a piece this past Sunday night about immigrant truck drivers being disqualified from renewing their licenses. The piece made no mention of the fact that soon there may not be any truck drivers at all. Those 18-wheelers scaring the shit out of us, barreling down the middle of the expressway, will be piloted by more cautious robots, perhaps relegated to the extreme right lane as in Europe. No time pressure. No need to get to the next rest stop to sleep.

Americans are getting a rapid dose of the future, but lawmakers are struggling to keep up with it. The idea that a Terminator may someday come after us is frightening, but somehow we forget the past. There were frightening times then also: wars, famines, the Great Depression, the Spanish flu killing millions, the Cold War.

Surely we can survive a few years of an unscrupulous, narcissistic, self-enriching president who might occasionally make a correct call here and there. Even Chauncey Gardner got the flowers to bloom.

Why we do not know the end of the War story.

 

 

So, here’s the deal.  The Trump administration thinks that it can change the government in Iran by bombing the shit out of them.  

 

President Trump thinks that airpower has changed the equation that internal political forces can be changed from the air.  Historical precedent basically says otherwise, but we do not know if the assumption is still correct because warfare has changed with the use of precision guided bombs, accurate intelligence as to the conditions on the ground.  We also don’t know if the CIA and the Mossad are organizing opposition on the ground or what political forces are being internally deployed yet.

 

We have never really seen an entire class of political leadership eliminated on the first day of an air war.  David Petraeus said that it was a remarkable accomplishment.  It probably was.  But as they say in the stock market, since past performance is no guarantee of future success, we do not know if this success story will continue.  It’s a huge gamble.

 

What I do not understand is the need for US government officials to make up reasons that will play out better for optics than the truth.   The American objective is to alter the threat of Iranian hegemony and a world order threatening Islamist revolution.   The idea that women must cover their heads, that there be a morality police, that civil rights are absent is unacceptable to us.  This is not within our control, though.  It must become unacceptable to the Iranian popple, whose track record of Jeffersonian principles is the same as Russians.  They lived under a Czar, or a Shah or a Communist dictator for hundreds or thousands of years.   Can we change those cultures?  Will they ever change?  The Czar was murdered, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Shah was ousted and we got Putin and Khamenei. One a murderous kleptocrat, the other a religious theocrat.  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

 

Yes, the idea that Iran was moving toward nuclear weapons by amassing a huge conventional shield of missiles and armaments to protect its malign project is true.  But an increased inspection program could arguably have succeeded in delaying it for a few years. But kicking the can down the road was not an acceptable alternative for Trump or Netanyahu.   Most Israelis favor Trump, despite the love-hate relationship of American Jews who lean left.

 

The argument that a nuclear armed foe that has been at war with the US and Israel for 47 years, exporting terrorism through its proxies, killing Americans throughout the Middle East, supporting the erasure of Israel,  spending billions in support of that goal dispels the argument that the US has entered a war of choice, a somewhat puzzling position for the Democrats to take.   The idea that because Trump did it transforms it into an evil deed.    Maybe so, but maybe not.  Hakeem Jeffries reduces his credibility by arguing that housing costs have gone up and poor people are starving because of this war.

 

The jury is out on whether this will be a misbegotten adventure or an astounding success in eliminating a source of religious zealotry that threatens the world order.  Oil us up today, the stock market is down, but here in Miami, the sun is shining and the threat to Dade County does not feel as imminent as the Cuban missile crisis did so many years ago.  We simply do not know at this early stage what will happen.  Predicting success or failure is not possible—yet.

Unafraid and afraid

Are we sure that the currents of history are changing because of a President whose ideas are an anachronistic resemblance of an America gone by? A nostalgic view of a white country that existed before the internet, before social media, before cellphones, before smartphones. A country where gays were swept under a carpet of denial—whose existence was not even acknowledged by polite society? A Miami where hotels blatantly denied admission to Jews, Blacks, and Latinos? White and colored restrooms? Segregated lunch counters?

Where gentlemen’s agreements among the WASP class excluded all those who did not conform to the standards of whiteness that were de rigueur in polite society? I had a friend who belonged to those clubs and rationalized the membership because she wanted to be with her friends. “Would you want to be in a club if the people were not your friends?” she would actually say that.

 

I grew up in Miami Beach. My parents moved here permanently in 1948, and I attended first grade here. I attended North Beach Elementary, where we had to pray to Jesus in the morning with a devotional conducted by the principal, Mrs. Mizner, even though many, if not most, of us were Jewish. We learned Christmas carols, and our housekeeper took us to Burdines on Flagler Street to see Santa Claus. My parents were not around, because they were working at their hotel day and night during the busy Christmas season. In the spring, we would pack up and head north, closing our house, placing acrid “DampRid” crystals to absorb the humidity in the house and keep the palmetto bugs at bay. We had one television, and I was the remote control. “David, change the channel,” Dad would say, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth in his wife-beater undershirt. We had no air conditioning until later, and Dad did not want to run the monstrosity because it was in a wall by the dining room and created a hurricane-force wind of freezing air. Plus, it was too expensive. “Dad, it’s really hot.” “Nah,” he would say, “take off your shirt and air your body.”

 

Dad would watch the CBS Evening News with Douglas Edwards and then Walter Cronkite. He hated Republicans and would never vote for one. “There are no good Republicans; they just want to keep everything for themselves.” When Joe McCarthy came to Miami and stayed at Dad’s hotel, Dad put his principles aside after suffering through the McCarthy hearings and hosted the Wisconsin cheesemakers’ convention at his hotel. McCarthy was the guest speaker. Even though Dad hated McCarthy and was orgasmic when Murrow took him down, Dad was happy to pocket the revenue from the delegates, most of whom were just ordinary folks from Wisconsin trying to make a living and down here for a bit of sun and sand.

 

Dad was not a big fan of Ike either. He called him MacArthur’s aide-de-camp and did not like his treatment of Truman and Marshall, and that Ike took a long time to stand up to McCarthy and said nothing when Oppenheimer was blacklisted. Mostly he loved Truman and Roosevelt. When Kennedy was assassinated, we sat in front of the TV for three days, tears in our eyes. At least Kennedy had Marilyn Monroe, not Stormy Daniels. The other politicians simply did not measure up to the Democrats.

We would watch the early civil rights marchers on TV, and Dad would call them troublemakers but admitted that maybe they had a point. He understood prejudice, having been its victim in his youth and having lost all his family to the Nazis. He paid his Black employees the same low wages he paid his white ones. After all, he was a capitalist.

 

We had a housekeeper, Kay, who had lost her boyfriend in the war and worked for us for room and board plus $25 a week. She was our nurse, our babysitter, and referee between me and my spoiled princess sister.

 

Later on, when Nixon ran for President, Dad made no secret of how wicked and evil Nixon was. I was living in New York at the time and voted for Nixon. For this I was never forgiven. Even later, when I returned to Florida and lived through Watergate, refusing to acknowledge the crimes, I learned a good lesson. Dad understood good and evil better than I did. He also understood life a bit better. But I was young and unafraid.

 

Now I am afraid.