Scrambling for the Lifeboats in Trump World

Following Donald Trump’s lengthy unscripted press conference last week in the lobby of Trump Tower that astonished listeners with its demonization of the protesters who opposed Nazi and white nationalist demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia—rattling the foundations of the American consciousness—Trump is finding that the rats are running amuck on the gunwales and the passengers are scrambling for the lifeboats.

A great many individuals and groups are making a public case for jettisoning all confidence in the man who occupies the Oval Office, and Narcissistic Donald must surely be taking note in his black heart even if he has not made any public acknowledgment.

Loss of Business for Mar-a-Lago and Other Trump Enterprises

Donald’s “Winter White House,” his gilded Palm Beach hideaway Mar-a-Lago, has just lost most of its major business events for the next year.

The following seventeen (17) organizations have announced their cancellation of yearly galas or organizational luncheon or dinner meetings that were scheduled to occur at the posh former winter mansion of the late Marjorie Merriweather Post, with one of the organization spokespersons citing Dante: “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis”:

(1) The Ryan Licht Sang Bipolar Foundation, (2) The Autism Project of Palm Beach County, (3) Big Dog Ranch Rescue, (4) Lois Pope Life Foundation and Leaders in Furthering Education, (5) The American Friends of Magen David Adom, (6) The Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach, (7) The Cleveland Clinic, (8) The American Red Cross, (9) The Salvation Army, (10) The Susan G. Komen Foundation, (11) Leaders in Furthering Education (LIFE), (12) The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, (13) The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, (14) The Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, (15) Morselife Foundation, (16) Confrérie de la Chaîne des Rôtisseurs, and (17) Hearing the Ovarian Cancer Whisper.

Three (3) other organizations are wavering in their decisions to hold future events at Mar-a-Lago: (1) the Unicorn Children’s Foundation, (2) the Raymond F. Kravis Center, and (3) the Palm Beach Habilitation Center.

The same thing “may be happening at other Trump businesses,” according to The Washington Post:

“Outside Los Angeles . . . a golf course owned by Trump has seen a decline in golf revenue, big outdoor weddings and charity golf tournaments [beginning] in the summer of 2015, after Trump attacked Mexican immigrants during the speech that announced his campaign.” In Trump’s home town, New York City, “both Trump’s golf course in the Bronx and his hotel in SoHo appear to have experienced declines in banquet business and event-space rentals [with] the Trump SoHo hotel [seeing] a drop in companies renting out its ballrooms for meetings, and . . . officials . . . considering layoffs.”

Kennedy Center Honorees Avoid Association with Trump

President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump will not attend this year's Kennedy Center Honors on December 2d following the refusal or anticipated refusal of all five honorees to participate if the Trumps were to be present. This is Trump acknowledging that he would otherwise be humiliated in front of the entire country.

The 2017 honorees are TV producer Norman Lear, dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade, singer Lionel Richie, vocalist Gloria Estafan, and (potentially) rapper LL Cool J.

Two of these honorees—Norman Lear and Carmen de Lavallade—have also announced their intention to boycott the preliminary White House reception because the Trumps will be present, and a third is undecided.

This scenario is reminiscent of Trump's refusal to throw out the first ball last April at the Washington Nationals season-opening baseball game. He and the Secret Service understood the magnitude of the fans' disapproval, which would have been (at a minimum) huge waves of angry shouts and potentially the acts of a would-be assassin. Newsweek speculated that, “At the age of 70, though, we're not sure President Trump has the attention span or patience to appreciate baseball, especially if he considers football to be boring.”

(Query: Does Trump really give a damn about these public appearances? Highly unlikely. He can use the time to play golf and watch Fox News. I haven’t heard of the Trumps attending a single concert of any music or a play or any other staged performance. If the people on a stage don’t include Donald rousing his troops and burnishing his self-image, then Donald just isn’t interested.)

National Advisory Panels Appointed by Trump Self-Destruct

Vaunted national advisory panels set up by Trump imploded this past week.

First, the proposed Infrastructure Advisory Council was abandoned by Trump after failing to meet and after Trump failed to make a coherent proposal to shore up and improve America’s woefully inadequate roads, airports, trains, bridges, and tunnels, overshadowed by many far more modern European counterparts. Although Trump’s latest budget proposes $200 billion in federal funds to be invested in infrastructure over the next ten years, with additional incentives to encourage $800 billion in investment from the private sector, there will apparently be no industry input into planning and execution.

Second, both the presidential Manufacturing Council and the Strategy and Policy Forum imploded in recent days as member CEOs jumped ship faster than the press could keep up in the wake of Trump's unholy response to the white nationalist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one counter-demonstrator and two state police officers dead. The Strategy and Policy Forum had published a statement stating that it was disbanding because “intolerance, racism and violence have absolutely no place in this country and are an affront to core American values.”

“The advisory councils seem to have been largely symbolic, with few substantive initiatives on the table. . . . The business leaders had joined with the intention to do good work [one source said], but the president's lackluster response to Charlottesville, among other issues, made it hard to stay on board.” Ultimately, “[a] dozen members of [the] Strategy and Policy Council participated in a conference call last week, during which they all agreed to dissolve the group, . . . And after that, Trump tweeted that he was ‘ending both’ advisory councils ‘rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople’” who were members. Trump barely got his announcement on the electronic superhighway before the Council could formally dissolve.

Seven members of the Manufacturing Council had publicly quit their panel before Trump stanched the bleeding and disposed of the body.

Third, the White House announced its plans to disband a Federal Climate Change Advisory Panel, just as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration acting administrator Ben Friedman informed the chair of the Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment that the NOAA would not renew the panel’s charter, which expired August 20th. The National Climate Assessment should be issued every four years, but it has only been issued three times since it was authorized by a 1990 statute. Committee members intend to continue working on their report although it will no longer constitute the official position of the federal government.

“Administration officials are currently reviewing [the Climate Science Special Report] that is key to the final document . . . [which] was produced by scientists from [thirteen] different federal agencies and estimates that human activities were responsible for an increase in global temperatures of 1.1 to 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit from 1951 to 2010.”

Panel Chair Richard Moss of the University of Maryland’s Department of Geographical Sciences “warned of consequences for the decisions that state and local authorities must make on a range of issues from building road projects to maintaining adequate hydropower supplies.” Such decisions will be divorced from concrete guidance on “how to factor climate change into future infrastructure.”

Fourth, members of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities quit en masse, with a published resignation letter signed by all seventeen appointees, the first letters of the paragraphs in that letter spelling out RESIST. The committee was founded in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan to act as an advisory group to the administration on cultural issues. Each of the private sector members was appointed by President Obama.

Military Leaders and Republican Politicians Distance Themselves Publicly from Trump

Five U.S. Joint Chiefs of the Military issued public condemnation of white supremacist groups as “messages to the general public, the troops and potential recruits.”

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson tweeted that, “Events in Charlottesville unacceptable and mustn’t be tolerated @USNavy for ever stands against intolerance & hatred.”

Then Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Robert B. Neller tweeted that there was “No place for racial hatred or extremism in @USMC. Our core values of Honor, Courage, and Commitment frame the way Marines live and act.”

He was followed by Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Mark Milley, who posted: “The Army doesn’t tolerate racism, extremism, or hatred in our ranks. It’s against our Values and Everything we’ve stood for since 1775.”

Air Force Gen. Dave Goldfein then stated the following: “I stand with my fellow service chiefs in saying we’re always stronger together—it’s who we are as #Airmen. Integrity, service and excellence . . . that’s what America’s Air Force is about.”

Finally, Chief of the National Guard Bureau Joseph Lengyel tweeted: “I stand with my fellow Joint Chiefs in condemning racism, extremism & hatred. Our diversity is our strength. #NationalGuard.”

The George Bushes, father and son, both former Republican Presidents, publicly enunciated their own principles about murderous bigots and domestic terrorists.

At least ten Republican Senators—“prospective jurors in any impeachment proceeding”—issued strong condemnatory statements against Donald Trump’s casual conflation of white supremacist and Nazi supporters with counterdemonstrators. They were:

Senator Robert Corker of Tennessee: Trump “"has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability, nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful."

Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona: “To carry on in the spring of 2017 as if what was happening was anything approaching normalcy required a determined suspension of critical faculties and tremendous powers of denial.”

Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah: “We should call evil by its name. My brother didn’t give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home.”

Senator Mike Lee, also of Utah: “Carrying a Nazi flag or any other symbol of white supremacy is a hateful act that cannot be morally defended, least of all by the leader of a diverse nation still healing from its original sin of racist slavery.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska: “What the president said . . . was wrong. There is no moral equivalence between those who are inviting hate and division and those who took to the streets to make it clear that those views are unacceptable.”

Senator Dan Sullivan, also of Alaska: “Anything less than complete & unambiguous condemnation of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the KKK by the @POTUS is unacceptable. Period.”

Senator Rob Portman of Ohio: “The response to this ideology of hate & bigotry, & the act of domestic terrorism, should be simple & united condemnation without ambiguity.”

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida: “Very important for the nation to hear @potus describe events in #Charlottesville for what they are, a terror attack by #whitesupremacists.”

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina: “What we want to see from our president is clarity and moral authority. And that moral authority [was] compromised [by Trump at his final press conference]. There’s no question about that.”

Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina: “When it comes to white supremacists & neo-nazis, there can be no equivocating: they’re propagators of hate and bigotry. Period.”

Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey: "In my view, the president's comments about 'both sides' were a mistake and they shouldn't have been said and I certainly wouldn't have said them and don't say them today and I don't agree with them and I don't adopt them."

Religious Leaders Condemn Trump

Top advisers to Pope Francis have published a strong criticism of President Donald Trump and the right-wing policies taking hold in the United States. “A message was published in an official Vatican news magazine, titled La Civilta Cattolica, which has authorized approval from Pope Francis himself.” Top Catholic leaders are calling out Trump specifically, and complaining that Republicans have created a “problematic fusion between religion and state, faith and politics, religious values and economy.”

A New York City megachurch pastor became the first religious leader to step down from President Trump's evangelical advisory board (the Evangelical Faith Council). Alphonso R. Bernard, Sr., the pastor of the Christian Cultural Center Megachurch in Brooklyn, New York, announced on Twitter Friday that "it became obvious that there was a deepening conflict in values between myself and the administration." The church claims 37,000 members, and is apparently the largest evangelical church in New York City.

Chicago-area megachurch pastor James MacDonald reminded his followers that he resigned October 13, 2016 after the Access Hollywood tapes were published during Trump’s campaign. MacDonald had called Trump “lecherous and worthless” in a letter to the rest of the council.

In the wake of the controversial public comments by Trump, several other evangelical leaders have spoken out against racism from their pulpits.

And a group of alumni from one of the country's most influential evangelical Christian universities, Liberty University, is condemning their school's president for his continued alignment with President Trump. A small but growing number of Liberty University graduates are preparing to return diplomas to their school, protesting University President Jerry Falwell Jr.'s ongoing support for Trump. They began organizing after Trump's divisive remarks about the deadly white supremacist protests in Charlottesville and Falwell’s comments praising Trump’s remarks.

Some Liberty graduates see Falwell's association with Trump as both a personal liability and a moral embarrassment.

The Week’s Magazine Covers Feature a KKK Hooded Trump in Quadruplicate

This week’s New Yorker includes a blowhard Trump in a sailboat propelled by a sail shaped like a KKK hat with two eyeholes (“Hate in America”); The Economist, Trump bellowing into a white megaphone pierced by two black holes, to resemble a Ku Klux Klan hood; Time Magazine, Trump delivering a Nazi salute; and (by the same artist), for Der Spiegel, the president beneath a tall white hood in a piece titled “Trump’s True Face.”

Other Developments

Trump failed to reach out to the family of slain Charlottesville protestor Heather Heyer until her funeral was under way, by which time Heather’s mother Susan Bro had had her fill of Trump’s equivocations and lies, and refused to take his calls.

The Democrats have introduced a motion to censure Trump in the House.

The Mayor of Baltimore, with the consent of the Baltimore City Council, had all Confederate statutes in the city removed during the overnight hours shortly after the Charlottesville press events.

Trump’s temporary return to Trump Tower in Manhattan was met with large surging crowds protesting the week’s events. He soon left to return to his Virginia golf course (the one with the phony Civil War plaque commemorating a non-existent battle).