What has happened since? House Republicans have cycled through speakers, tried to shut down the government several times and brought the United States to the brink of default. They spent months on bogus impeachment investigations and harassed local district attorneys prosecuting defeated former president Donald Trump. They also demanded, and then nixed, a border-control measure. To top it off, they refused even a vote on vital aid for Ukraine. It sure doesn’t appear as though they learned their lesson.
Some House Republicans are destructive, bordering on nihilistic, because they are following Trump’s lead. And sure enough, Republican primary voters are on the verge of handing the nomination to a man who threatens courts and the FBI, spews fascist “pure” blood language, vows to unleash the Justice Department on his enemies (“I am your vengeance!”) and sabotages bipartisanship when it suits his interests. He still refuses to admit he lost in 2020 — a sign he would not accept defeat this year, either. In a textbook case of toxic narcissism, Trump mentions the death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny only in connection with his own (self-inflicted) legal problems.
He brags about removing the protection of abortion rights, which upended the lives of millions of women, their families and the medical community. He wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act with no replacement in sight. He wants to split NATO. Chaos, chaos and more chaos.
To top it off, he will be running while sitting through at least one criminal trial — and possibly two. Should he be convicted in one or more and then elected, we will have leaped into a constitutional dumpster fire in which either the will of the voters or the judgment of juries in criminal cases might be sacrificed to satisfy the other. If he loses in November, we can expect a rerun of Jan. 6, 2021. Violence and chaos.
Even Republicans acknowledge the former president’s destructive impulses. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley regularly calls Trump out for bringing on chaos. She also declared, “An unhinged president is an unsafe president.” Her audiences understand exactly what she means.
Trump’s maelstrom has yet to reach its apex. He will likely decompose further as his financial situation craters and his criminal cases go from bad to worse. With every temper tantrum on courtroom steps, flurry of insane posts on social media and outburst at a judge, he will remind voters of what they hate — and what they have to fear should he return to the White House.
President Biden gets harangued constantly about his age, but no one seriously thinks he is impulsive, destructive, chaotic, plundering, violent or bent on dismantling our constitutional system. We need not worry that he will try to pardon himself and hundreds of insurrectionists. We know he declines to interfere with the Justice Department, abides by court rulings and respects the military’s apolitical role. He is trying to bolster the international order, not upend it. With age and solid character come stability, calm, competence and, occasionally, wisdom. That is the real contrast between the two.
Distinguished person of the week
With breathtaking poise and steely determination, Yulia Navalnaya appeared at the Munich Security Conference this past weekend and announced the death of her husband, opposition leader Alexei Navalny, in a Russian prison. She told the audience, “I thought: should I stand here before you or should I go back to my children? And then I thought: What would have Alexei done in my place? And I’m sure that he would have been standing here on this stage.”
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton met Navalnaya at the Munich conference, later posting online: “I’m in awe of her strength and sense of purpose, even as she and her family have sacrificed so much for the country they love. Her fight for democracy and freedom, like her husband’s, is our fight too.” Unfortunately, the GOP cannot or will not grasp that.
This week, Navalnaya also released a video, The Post reported. “[Vladimir] Putin did not only murder the person, Alexei Navalny,” she said, her voice choked with emotion. “He wanted, along with him, to kill our hope, our freedom, our future.” She continued: “My husband could not be broken, and that’s exactly why Putin killed him, in the most cowardly way. He did not have the courage to look him in the eye or even say his name. And now they are also cowardly, hiding his body, not showing him to his mother, not giving it to her.”
She managed to not only honor her husband’s legacy and give hope to other dissidents but also to shame Republicans who refuse to vote on Ukraine aid, thereby aligning themselves with Navalny’s killer. Navalnaya’s courageous words provide a stark contrast with spineless, cowering House Republicans. If they vote for aid, they would not face death or imprisonment, only the ire of Trump, the four-times-indicted former president and Putin poodle. Her valiant stand reminds us that freedom requires courage, sacrifice and moral clarity. And, sadly, it reminds us that a once-great party has become a killer’s lap dog.
I love nothing better than a well-written, deeply sourced history book that reads like a novel. “The Longest Minute: The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906” by Matthew J. Davenport checks all those boxes. Davenport provides a near minute-by-minute, granular account of the quake and subsequent fire that devastated San Francisco in 1906. You know how it all turns out, but that takes nothing away from the drama. He details heroic stands to save the ferry building and the U.S. Mint and the wharf, as well as the jaw-dropping missteps (including the mayor’s order to shoot all looters). Amid tragedy, the fault lines (pun intended) of class and race that still divide U.S. cities loom large. The intense research that went into bringing individuals — some famous, others lost to history — to life is nothing short of remarkable. Davenport succeeds in placing discrete stories within the broader sweep of an American city undergoing rapid change.
In another era, across the continent, Michael Wolraich’s “The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age” takes a deep dive into the scandalous 1931 murder of Vivian Gordon — a former vaudevillian, shakedown artist and an embittered ex-con. She was strangled and left dead in Cortland Park in the Bronx. On one level, the book is a crime thriller, complete with multiple suspects harboring plenty of motives for killing Gordon. But her murder, as you might have guessed, reveals much more: police and judicial corruption, the emergence of modern organized crime and Tammany Hall’s precipitous decline at the onset of the Great Depression. The battle between “freedom and virtue,” as Wolraich put it, pits reformers and “traditional values” against libertine elements in a city transitioning from 1920′s riches to Depression rags. He weaves together characters as effectively as E.L. Doctorow did in novels such as “Ragtime” and “Billy Bathgate.” But the real star remains the city of New York in all it contradictions — ever elegant and seedy, uplifting and soul-crushing, progressive and reactionary.
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