How Trump is Killing America

“E Pluribus Unum” (Latin: “Out of many, one”) — once the US’ official motto, which still appears in a wavy scroll near the eagle, in the Great Seal on the back of every dollar bill.

What makes us us? What makes us “America”? What makes us different—fundamentally different—from every other nation on Earth? Shouldn’t we know the answers to those questions before we can even begin to “Make America Great Again”? (emphasis added)

The answers lie not in any political ideology, left, right or center. They lie in how we arose, grew and developed as a nation. They inhere in our nation’s unique history.

Every other nation grew in place. Each arose from strangers and nomadic tribes migrating into its territory, sometimes warring, sometimes coalescing, but eventually coexisting and developing a common language, a common culture and common rules and laws.

I suppose you could argue that every nation, including ours, developed this way, at least in the long run. Science tells us that all we humans evolved from apes on the African savannah and dispersed globally from there to everywhere on Earth (except for the Arctic and Antarctic regions).

But there’s a huge difference in time scales. Other nations took millennia or eons to evolve. Their evolutionary time scales were so long that their growth was partly social and partly biological. Hence the blond hair and blue eyes in Sweden, the slanted eyes and dark hair in China, and the brown skin and curly hair of most people in Africa.

In contrast, we Americans became a nation on paper only 149 years ago. If you count from the Pilgrims’ first arrival in New England, less than 4.25 centuries have passed. If you count from the first arrivals of “Native Americans” over the land bridge from Asia during the last Ice Age—maybe 20,000 years ago—that’s still far too short for biological evolution. Natives’ common Asian-like features and dark hair attest to that.

So every single group now constituting “Americans,” including the “Natives,” came here on a time scale far too short for biological evolution. And if you consider the terrible treatment of the Natives, even to this day, it becomes clear that the more recent “newcomers,” from England, Europe and elsewhere, created the dominant culture and most of the laws and customs, all in the last four centuries. This is a mere microsecond in human evolution.

So we Americans, or our ancestors in living memory, all came from somewhere else. We did not evolve in place, whether culturally, socially, linguistically, politically or (of course) biologically. As FDR once proclaimed in a speech to the Daugters of the American Revolution, “all of us . . . are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.“

We came here and, on time scales of individual perception shorter than a single human lifetime, learned the dominant language (English) and fit in, often changing the dominant culture in the process. Many of us tried to “fit in” by working hard to change existing laws and customs to be nearer to our heart’s desire. This is how the values of the “Enlightenment”—a social, political and philosophical movement then less than a century old—figured so strongly in our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution and our earliest laws.

All that we are as a nation—all that distinguishes us from other nations—flows from these simple facts and their corollaries. We are indeed a “nation of immigrants” in the most fundamental sense.

The first corollary is simple but profound. People don’t pick up all their stuff, permanently sever all their social and family ties, and move to another continent, or across the Darien Gap, if they are already happy where they are. Our ancestors who came here gave up everything they had and knew to seek a better life in an unknown land. They were risk takers and innovators at their cores.

Is it any wonder, then, that the vast majority of technological inventions that define “modern” human life came from our people, from us “Americans”? Count ‘em and wonder: the electric light, the phonograph, modern submarines, the telephone, television, airplanes, high-altitude flight (with cabin pressurization), and the first workable solar panels, nuclear reactors, lasers, and robotic surgery devices. If we are a nation of risk-takers and innovators, it’s because all of us, or most of our ancestors within living memory, were willing to give up everything they knew to seek a better life.

The American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, all by himself, made three of the inventions on the foregoing list . He famously said that “Invention is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” People who took six to eight weeks to cross the Atlantic in sailing ships, or who now take weeks to get to and cross the Darien Gap on foot, and make their way up north on foot or by any ride they can hitch through most of Mexico, have that sort of pioneer spirit.

Now Trump wants to stop all that. If allowed, he would stop all immigration cold and claim a great victory. To make that seem desirable, he tells innumerable lies about “foreign” immigrants, especially those who are not from the British Isles, Scandinavia, or Northern Europe and who don’t have white skin. He would limit immigrants to those people who make him and his class of tired, lazy, corrupt, and conniving plutocrats comfortable.

Trump would thus bring back the same kind of declining aristocracy that our Founders and their fiercest supporters fought so hard and risked their “lives, fortunes and sacred Honour” to overthrow. Almost every day, he demonstrates by action and by word his preference for a nation where wealth rules, regardless of Reason, the law and even consistency. And he uses lawyers and the law in an often vain but wearing attempt to do so.

He vigorously defends suits of laborers and contractors that his businesses have stiffed. He prosecutes public officials, including his once loyal subordinates, for expressing adverse political views and for trying to maintain political neutrality and impartiality in the application of law. In an agenda of revenge, he uses our law and courts not as a reasonable means to prosecute lawbreakers, but as a cudgel to grind his personal enemies down. And his recent machinations with cryptocurrencies and “modern” finance make clear his ambitions to use his political power to multiply his personal and family wealth and overcome a lifetime of individual business failure. What sort of incompetence and ineptitude in business does it take to bankrupt several casinos?

As for racial and ethnic equality and “Equal Justice under Law” (the motto on our Supreme Court’s building), Trump has taken a riff on Adolf Hitler’s approach. Instead of committing genocide on 6 million Jews, gypsies and others, Trump has waged a verbal war against several different identifiable groups, including black Haitians, Muslims, Mexican and Central American immigrants and alleged black “criminals” (a broadly defined group!) generally. At the same time, he tries to avoid a “racist” label by making over-to-top accusations of “antisemitism” against people protesting international grievances for plausible reasons.

If this list of Trump’s failures and flaws has more than a passing resemblance to the list of “whereases” in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence from King George III, that resemblance is hardly coincidental. Trump has, in his semi-literate and semi-grammatical public statements, impugned or violated almost every principle set forth in that Declaration and our Constitution, especially our Bill of Rights.

The longer he stays in office, the more precarious and fleeting our once-great Republic will be. For he has created and is trying to entrench an aristocracy of wealth and crude “business” supremacy every bit as meritless and oppressive as the English aristocracy of royalty and land that we immigrants and descendants of immigrants on this Continent threw off by force of arms 149 years ago. If it’s not yet time for an entirely new declaration of independence, it’s certainly time for more faithful adherence to the original.

Endnote on our Supreme Court’s Malfeasance

In his catastrophic presidential-immuniy opinion in Trump v. United States, Chief Justice Roberts used the word “energetic” five times, the word “vigorous” three times, and the word “efficiency” once — all in referring to our American president or his office. But none of these words describes the core values of America’s political and legal system that made it great.

Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror in Nazi Germany was nothing if not “energetic,” “vigorous” and efficient. He exterminated 6 million mostly innocent people without even the ghost of a trial to determine what, if anything, against Germany’s interests they had done.

If you want to exterminate people like cockroaches, poison gas and ovens are “energetic,” “vigorous” and efficient ways to do it. But that is hardly the earmark of a just or good society. That’s why, at the end of World War II, Germany’s capital had been reduced to rubble resembling today’s Gaza, and few outside Germany mourned.

If we are to “Make America Great Again,” we should not import the values of Nazi Germany. The better way to do it is to make sure that the humblest citizen feels he or she is getting a fair hearing and a just disposition of complaints, not to make our chief executive more energetic and efficient.

Self-evident justice, not energy, vigor or efficiency, was what made America great and can again. That’s why Roberts’ horrific decision was roundly condemned not just by me, but by a host of legal minds and scholars, including a distinguished judge retired from a federal circuit court of appeals, a self-described “conservative.” Permalink to this post

How Trump Threatens Our Species’ Survival

DISCLAIMER: This post is not based on “inside information.” I am not privy to the state secrets of any nation, including our own. Therefore, I’m revealing no classified information here.

Every step in this reasoning is based on publicly available information, logical deduction from it, and my knowledge, experience and intuition derived from my first career as a scientist/engineer with a Ph.D. in physics (UC San Diego, 1971), plus a lifetime of thinking about physical and human cause and effect. If you wish to treat these conclusions as “informed speculation” or even “sheer speculation,” that’s your privilege. But please take them seriously.

The ultimate foundation of human morality and civilization is personal responsibility. At the end of the day, what keeps people’s behavior within moral and legal bounds is the practical consequences of their bad acts. That means real penalties for wrongdoing that actually hurt (or extinguish the wrongdoer).

In this regard, one of the most important events in human history was the Nuremberg Trials after World War II. Those trials brought to justice the surviving leading aggressors in our species’ most horrible war (so far), plus some of the perpetrators of the Holocaust. It took a worldwide catastrophe and the most-deadly-ever genocide to motivate those trials, but the outcome was execution of the chief surviving villains (Hitler had killed himself in his bunker) and long prison terms for their underlings.

In the years since World War II, our species developed a number of institutions designed to promote individual responsibility for general wrongdoing, including so-called “crimes against humanity.” They include the United Nations, the International Court of Justice at the Hague, and the International Criminal Court. Tellingly, the US and Russia both failed to subscribe to the International Criminal Court. Yet both together possess the overwhelming majority of our species’ nuclear weapons, as well as the most sophisticated ways of delivering them.

It gets worse, much worse. At this moment in history, four individual leaders have practical control over nuclear weapons with little or no effective means to insure their personal accountability to anyone. Their names, in alphabetical order of surnames, are: Kim Jong-Un, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump.

I exclude other leaders of nuclear powers for two reasons. First and most important, none of the others has threatened to use nuclear weapons, or has made or threatened war in the recent past. Second, all the others seem effectively restrained by workable democracies, powerful and reasonable allies, and/or publicized policies limiting nuclear weapons to deterrence and perhaps a last-resort nuclear counter-strike. In the case of China, Xi Jinping, to my knowledge, has never threatened first use, even (especially) with respect to Taiwan. On the contrary, he has repeatedly emphasized deterrence.

Each of the four individual leaders appears to have the power to order the use of nuclear weapons unilaterally. Kim and Putin are absolute despots, and both already have ordered conventional attacks on neighbors that have caused damage, real in the case of South Korea, and catastrophic in the case of Ukraine. Although Netanyahu and Trump are leaders of ostensible democracies, the former has shown the practical power to make and prolong devastating war, with numerous atrocities against civilians in Gaza and Lebanon, and Trump has sole authority over the “Football” to launch nuclear weapons, ostensibly for quick response in the event of an attack.

Science tells us that a general exchange of nuclear weapons between the US and Russia would likely cause a “nuclear winter” that could extinguish most higher life forms on Earth, leaving the future of our planet to deep-sea creatures, cockroaches, and microbes. So our own president is one of a handful of individuals who have the practical power to start a nuclear war that could, in essence, extinguish our species. All four, in one way or another, explicitly or by innuendo, have threatened to use nuclear weapons.

What, if anything, restrains the Big Four nuke brandishers? In the case of Kim, his country is small and compact. A quiet nuclear-armed submarine hiding off his coast could launch a small nuke to obliterate his headquarters, but not his people, within less than ten minutes of receiving an order. The case of Netanyahu is different: none of his nation’s nearby enemies has nuclear weapons. He could, for example, obliterate Tehran, Qom, and/or Riyadh with no immediate consequences beyond conventional war and verbal condemnation by the international community.

Unfortunately, nothing much restrains Putin or Trump but their nations’ own internal politics and their own, personal, individual calculations of retaliation and other consequences. In other words, insofar as they are concerned, the future of our species lies in their hands and heads.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some individual consequence for a catastrophic decision that might extinguish our species, other than the decider dying himself while also extinguishing the rest of us? In that regard, there may be some hope. At least we might have something to restrain Putin, if Trump doesn’t give it away.

Enter stealth technology. It’s not a single thing. It’s a whole complex of matter, means and methods. It includes special materials, special coatings for metals, geometric configurations of surfaces, and modes of use—all potentially involving either aircraft or missiles. This technology reportedly allows them to escape detection by known, conventional means, such as radar.

Using stealth technology, an American fighter or bomber, or an American missile, could deliver a small nuke to the Kremlin, or to Putin’s palace on the Black Sea coast, wiping it and him off the face of the Earth but leaving Moscow (or the rest of it) and the rest of Russia intact. And it could do this “stealthily,” presumably in a surprise attack that would keep Putin and other targeted leaders from escaping in time.

If that happened, what would the surviving Russian military do? Would they launch an all-out nuclear response, thereby ensuring the extinction of our species, including themselves? More likely, they would try to do something similar to us, i.e., to wipe out the White House and Congress without harming much else.

Conventional wisdom is that, lacking our stealth technology, they don’t have effective means to do so. But they could launch missiles with small nukes from nearby subs hiding off the Atlantic coast. If they launched enough from enough different subsea locations, one might get through.

As this account suggests, the balance of nuclear terror is now granular. Not only do the US and Russia each have the power to extinguish each other and our species. They also appear to have the more limited power to wipe out each other’s centers of national power, including its leaders, in a surprise attack that prevents the leaders’ timely removal. In other words, “decapitation” with small nuclear weapons is now a real possibility.

How real and effective is that threat? I don’t know, because I don’t have inside information. I suspect that no one—not even our own intelligence services—really knows because: (1) our knowledge of Russian countermeasures is mostly guesswork and (2) our stealth technology has never been tested against Russian defenses in anything resembling real combat.

But that’s precisely the point. Each side doesn’t know the real capabilities of the other, and that uncertainty creates a deterrent. If there’s any real probability of our decapitating the Russian government in a tense situation, the Russian military has to take that into account. So does Putin, who would undoubtedly be the prime target personally in any decapitation move.

With its secret stealth technology, the US has a bit of an upper hand in potential decapitation. Stealth technology gives it the ability, at least in theory, to attack with small nukes from the sea, from the air, and perhaps even from land (for example, from bases in Europe). This advantage—to the extent understood by the Russians—gives us leverage to keep Putin “honest.” (And recall the great Russian embarrassment in 1987, when a German teenager named Matthew Rust flew a Cessna, without permission, right into Red Square.)

So now, at last, we can get to the point of this essay. In his recent sycophancy to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (“MBS”) of Saudi Arabia, Trump promised to deliver our most advanced jet fighters, F-35s, which reportedly contain and embody our most advanced stealth technology. Up to now, we have provided these fighters only to our closest allies, and only under conditions of strict military secrecy.

Saudi Arabia is an “ally” in name only. It’s a monarchy and for all practical purposes a tyranny and dictatorship, with no guarantee of secrecy but MBS’ word. If he changes his mind or just gets careless, all our secret stealth technology embodied in the F-35 could fall into our rivals’ hands. And you can bet that both Russia and China will use every trick of the trade, fair and foul, to acquire one of those planes—or merely to examine and dissect it, secretly in a closed hangar—while in the Saudis’ hands. Imagine what payments or concessions they might make MBS for that short-term privilege!

Potential disclosure of our stealth technology could be devastating to the balance of terror that keeps the peace between major powers, as well as to the smaller balance of terror that, so far, seems to have kept Putin from using small nukes inside Ukraine. No matter how superior (or not) our stealth technology may be to Russia’s and China’s, the uncertainty of not knowing makes the leaders of those nations hesitant to violate the unwritten “nuclear taboo,” even with small nukes.

Although a thing of shadows, this deterrent is very real. Its uncertainty constrains the actions of our rivals’ leaders for very concrete and personal reasons. It’s a modern counterpart to the Nuremberg Trials, but looking forward, not backward.

If China, let alone Russia, acquires our stealth technology, the loss will not only cripple our fast-waning military-technological supremacy. It will also heighten the risk of Russia (probably not China) using tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield, for example in Ukraine. (What do you think made Putin stop threatening to use tactical nukes on Ukrainian battlefields, as he did repeatedly during the early stages of his vicious aggression? Could it have been expressed or implied threats to take him out personally with small nukes if he did so?)

By transgressing the “nuclear taboo,” Putin’s use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine would substantially increase the likelihood of a significant nuclear exchange, if not species self-extinction. And Putin’s ability to “steal” our secret stealth technology from or through Saudi Arabia would significantly decrease our deterrence, thereby making such tactical use more likely.

This is what happens when a great democracy chooses as supreme leader a man who is stupid, catastrophically ignorant in everything but acquiring wealth, thoughtless, capricious and self-obsessed, and who ignores the law, national precedent, and strategic concerns with potentially catastrophic consequences in pursuit of short-term national and personal gain. Isn’t it past time to start thinking seriously about impeachment and/or Amendment 25?


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Will Failure to Stop Sexual Enslavement at Last Bring Trump Down?

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” — Declaration of Independence (1776).

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”— Thirteenth Amendment (1865, after the deadliest war in US history).

“America! America!”
“God mend thine every flaw”
“Confirm thy soul in self-control”
“Thy liberty in law!”
— from the original version of “America the Beautiful,” conceived by Katharine Lee Bates on the summit of Pikes Peak, Colorado (conceived 1893, first published 1895).

Funny thing about sex. After centuries of Puritan shame and self-denial, modern, developed societies have come to see sexual acts as what they are, one of life’s supreme pleasures. In legalizing same-sex marriage, our Supreme Court, in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), implicitly recognized that consensual sex, whether or not for procreation, cannot be outlawed in a society that calls itself “free.” What people do for pleasure, voluntarily, in private, and with few or no negative consequences for others, should be their own business.

But coerced sex is another matter. Nearly every human society has laws against rape. And rightly so. The fact that most males are bigger and stronger than most females should not be an excuse for society tolerating one person forcing another to be the instrument of his pleasure and her pain, remorse and shame, let alone involuntary childbirth.

But what happens when the forcing is not directly physical and violent? What happens when the whips and chains are merely metaphorical, i.e., verbal threats and psychological leverage? Shouldn’t the same rules apply?

The recent memoir co-authored by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Nobody’s Girl, highlights the issue. It was published after Giuffre’s own suicide. You needn’t read the whole book to get the sociopolitical gist: you can glean that from this short TV interview with her surviving co-author.

Guiffre had the misfortune to be born to a violent, uncontrolled and abusive father. Early in her puberty, he molested her sexually during a camping trip. When she protested and resisted, he dragged her into the family camper and beat the hell out of her. Although other family members and possibly bystanders were nearby and undoubtedly heard, no one raised a hand or voice to help her.

In her interview, the co-author explains brilliantly that this horrible and tragic incident taught Giuffre “how the world works.” Is it any wonder that she much later became one of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual slaves, held in bondage by mere verbal threats, Mafia-Don-style, to harm her brother, whom she loved?

None of this is subtle. It’s wrong at a basic emotional and human level. It’s wrong even if the violence or harm was a mere threat, not actual, and even if the threats were directed “only” at another.

Understanding its deep, human wrongness doesn’t require much intelligence. You don’t even have to be smart enough to know that tariffs are a form of tax. Sexual slavery is wrong even when the violence or coercion is merely covert, implied or suggested. It’s the coercion that matters, not the means.

No doubt there are predatory men who can “smell” the susceptibility of women like Giuffre to coercion and abuse, just as animals smell fear. Through emotional intelligence and twisted experience, they learn how to exploit this sort of weakness.

God knows that Trump is well practiced in the art of Mafia-like coercion. Just think of all the ostensible MAGA pols who express reservations or even revulsion in private and yet refuse to speak (or vote!) in public lest they lose their position and power. Trump has them in his grip as surely as Epstein and Ghislaine held young ladies as psychological sex slaves in their involuntary orgies, and by much the same means.

The Brits get it. They took away Prince Andrew’s title as Duke of York on suspicion of complicity in Epstein’s coercion. Should our own President, if shown to have also been complicit, not suffer a similar fate?

The extraordinary thing about Donald Trump is his uncanny ability to get millions of people to believe things that are just not so. It’s a remarkable skill. He’s a veritable virtuoso of twisted emotional intelligence, playing on voters’ fears, rages, hatreds and prejudices as if they were some celestial grand piano.

He succeeds because he has legions of willing accomplices. Media businesses and their owners find it in their interest to push his twisted schemes so as to preserve and enhance their own wealth and power, lower their taxes, and evade the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. (This is also how Rome’s democracy fell.) Anonymous Internet geeks can get their fifteen minutes of fame—and sometimes a share of their own wealth—by the same means.

It’s all possible because ordinary people have to apply their cerebral cortices to a minimal knowledge of history and human nature to see what’s going on. Among other things, they have to be able to understand that foreign countries don’t pay tariffs. That sort of societal “protection” failed in ancient Rome and is failing our democracy today, at Trump’ s characteristic “Warp Speed.”

But sex is different. No special study, knowledge or experience is needed to understand. All females instinctively sympathize with women like Giuffre because all have known her fear and uncertainty personally, even if only while walking through dark alleys in questionable areas.

All males have sexual impulses that we have to control and suppress in a civilized society. We all have mothers, sisters, aunts, nieces, wives, lovers, and/or female friends whom we have to protect. We all know instinctively that sexual slavery is wrong, and that it is our evolutionary and civilizational job to protect the “weaker sex.”

Trump also knows this instinctively. His analytical intelligence is, without a doubt, among the lowest of any American president’s—if not the single lowest ever. That’s why he seems genuinely unable to fathom that tariffs act like a form of tax.

But Trump’s emotional intelligence is undoubtedly among the highest even among pols, who rely on emotional intelligence for their living. That’s why he can hold in thrall so many pols and voters who should know better: he grabs them by their amygdalas, without engaging their Reason.

So Trump knows that l’affaire Epstein has engaged the nation’s emotions in a way that no political issue has or can. And, if only vaguely, he understands why. That’s why he has spent so much effort, sometimes laughably, to distract us. That’s why, as the noose closes, he’s getting defensive, petulant, and even nastier and more deranged than usual. He understands in his gut that this is a gut issue that no informational lie can heal.

At the end of the day, it was a simple act of erasing three minutes of the “Watergate Tapes” that brought an end to Richard Nixon’s twisted presidency. We don’t yet know to what extent Trump knew of Epstein’s ring of sexual slavery or to what extent he tolerated or even participated in it. But it’s clear that Trump fears any hint that he knew of it and failed to stop it or even to try.

Whatever the facts, Trump has gone all out to keep the Epstein Files from the light of day. But there is nothing so tantalizing to ordinary people as the sex lives of the rich and famous, and nothing so deep in our emotions as the desire to protect those whom we love.

Trump knows this instinctively, just as he “knows” anything. That’s why he’s freaking out. And that’s why the fear and “loyalty” that so many weak-willed, cowardly pols have toward him is fragile. They could turn against him in an instant, and for reasons far more deeply embedded in our human souls than a three-minute tape erasure.

Let it be so.

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