May 3, 2018: The Mayans and Germans Never Saw It Coming - Do Americans Now?

 

5/3/18: It appears the Trump legal team is giving up. Ty Cobb resigns. Don McGahn is looking for an exit. Rudy Giuliani says, “f**k it,” and tacitly admits the president has been lying all along. 

Trump did know about the $130,000 hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, Rudy admits, even though the president has repeatedly told the American people he didn’t. 

____________________ 

The list of bootlickers, grovelers and sycophants that bring ruin upon our democracy will be long, assuming we have a system twenty years from now, where the possibility of publishing such a list exists.

____________________ 

 

For fifteen months, as Trump has run amok, trampling our nation’s core values, vilifying the free press, threatening to jail political foes, and tweeting madly in an effort to cast a pall over the Department of Justice and the F.B.I., this blogger has had one consolation. The American people seemed not to be falling for his tricks. 

Opinion polls gave me hope. (I’m not like Trump. I don’t believe in polls only when they reflect what I want to believe.) They showed, generally, that the American people were not buying his bull. 

Now the polls are starting to narrow. Taken in aggregate, opinion polls are highly accurate. A month ago, the president was down in most job approval ratings by 10-15 points. Now almost every poll shows his ratings moving in a positive direction, assuming you love Trump. Reuters/IPSOS had him down 39 percent to 58 percent, approval/disapproval, on April 10. Yesterday, the same poll put him at 49% to 49%. The Rasmussen poll, which tends to be an outlier, has had the president fluctuating, up a little, down a little, in recent weeks. Monmouth had him down 14 points on March 5. On April 30 he had closed the gap to 3.

 

As a former history teacher, I realize full well opinions vary. I understand what Sophocles meant, two millennia ago, when he said, “The wise are doubtful.” 

I know I could be wrong in what I think about Mr. Trump. 

Yet, I do know history. From everything I can tell, Trump represents an existential threat to our system of government. I believe the U.S. Constitution will be imperiled if Republican toadies (I don’t mean all Republicans) dominate Congress after 2018. I believe the rule of law might be doomed, at least until 2025, if Trump wins a second term. The list of bootlickers, grovelers and sycophants that bring ruin upon our democracy will be long, assuming we have a system twenty years from now, where the possibility of publishing such a list still exists. 

A study of history shows that human societies routinely fail to see disaster coming. Or they do, but have no idea how to respond. The Mayans failed to deal with environmental degradation. First their food supply collapsed. Then their society degenerated amid city vs. city warfare. The German people elected Adolf Hitler. Once in power he broke loose from restraint and unleashed hell. The Chinese have an untenable imbalance between male and female births (they admit 114 males are born for every 100 females; and many experts believe that ratio is even farther out of balance) and a society top-heavy with an aging population that a youthful cohort will find impossible to support. A sixth of the U.S. economy revolves around healthcare. Whether you like Obamacare or loathe it, over time the costs will be unsustainable. 

My biggest worry, however, is Donald J. Trump. I do not doubt at all that he’d close The New York Times and jail political opponents without trial if he believed he could only save himself.

Mayan civilization collapsed.