Resistance To Trump Coup - We Need Political Resistance Councils

It is astonishing that the Democratic party is even weaker than we thought it was. We’ve known that it’s sclerotic and geriatric, we’ve known that the leadership can’t talk its way out of a paper bag, we’ve known that it is riven by interests with singular, narrow foci. We’ve known that its kennel of consultants is mediocre in everything but continuing to get contracts for their mediocre services. We know that its leadership has been mostly focused on keeping officials in their jobs. We’ve known that the official leadership has few leaders. We’ve known that the senior leadership has occupied itself with keeping talented junior leaders out of leadership, and comfortably stifled so that little need change within the Democratic party apparatus. We’ve known that, even to the end, when the institutions supplied all the tools necessary to cage the tiger, they couldn’t get traction on the Mueller Report, and even when they were in power, all they could offer was the infuriatingly incompetent and much-more-than-cautious Merrick Garland, may his name live in perpetual infamy. No one even raised a rumpus about his two years of delay, and his appointment of sworn Biden enemies to investigate him and his family. No, silence is their specialty.

Yes, the evidence was there. The congressional leaders couldn’t even give a coherent speech — Schumer reads his speech into the lectern, and for all her virtues, Pelosi’s ability to explain and inspire is in the bottom 20th percentile. Those who could speak had to do it on their own, in what TV time they could cadge. The evidence was there.

But still. One has to still be astounded at the confused passivity of the Democratic party in the face of a coup — or an autogolpe — that was telegraphed explicitly by Trump. He said what he was going to do! Project 2025 laid out the roadmap! Trump said his appointments would be different this time! He said he would have a tariff war! He said he would side with Russia! He said Urban has it right! He even said that in his view elections were unnecessary.

So don’t act surprised, you dolts. Yes, you are deer in the headlights. You just aren’t the right person for the job that has to be done now. Schumer, where is he? Any leaders think of bringing the senate to a standstill, filibustering appointments that are in themselves a punch in the face? Chris Murphy and others urge leaders to shut the Senate down, but they don’t. Are Republicans the only ones who own the filibuster? Anyone think of stopping calling the paid-off and intimidated Republicans anything except “our esteemed friends on the other side of the aisle?” They are the enemy! Ever hear the term “going to the mattresses?” If not now, when?

Listen to the rally cry of our friends Chuck and Hakeem — “We have no power!” Wow, that will get the millions cheering. Passivity is widespread. Jackie Rosen, fresh off a difficult race for senator from Nevada, when she should be ebullient and energized that she won, instead echoes — “We’re the minority.” Hakeem goes off on a book tour to Chicago — I guess there’s nothing to do in Washington because, after all, you’re in the minority.

OK, people tell me: don’t get angry at the Democrats, get angry at the Republicans, they’re the one doing the damage. I say, look at sports. If an opposing team gets stronger and your home team doesn’t meet the challenge, do you get angry at the opposition, or do you assail you home ownership — what are you doing? Are you just cheap? Are you thinking of moving away and you want to lose? What’s your GM doing? You get angry at the malfeasance of your team, not the strength of the opposition. I admit the analogy breaks down when it comes to cheating — the Astros will never be forgiven, and there was Inflategate. We can indict Trump for his lying and cheating — but after all, did the Dems make good on it when they had control of the DOJ? Answer — no, they whiffed. Which they are very good at doing. I’m really pissed.

So OK, I’m pissed off. But what is to be done? Most of them recognize the danger, they see the ongoing destruction, but they were somehow built for another situation, for quiet discussions and compromise, for mutual respect of differences. They weren’t built for war. But war has come for them. It was coming, but most people wish things away and then are caught unawares. Look at the US congress and the Republican party in the late 1930’s, even when Hitler invaded Poland for God’s sake, it took Pearl Harbor for them to acknowledge the obvious. So we can’t expect more today. That’s the way comfortable politicians are. So what is to be done?

The geriatric and constitutionally cautious bumps on the log have to move to the rear seats and make room for the active, alert, dynamic crowd. The leadership won’t move, let them stay where they are. We need to form a Resistance Council.

A Resistance Council will be self-creating. The vibrant leaders need to form it themselves, and not wait for anyone’s permission, just declare themselves the Resistance Council, devoted to active resistance. They will try to educate the public in an organized, persuasive way. They will hold regular teach-in sessions, in a venue more elevated than the steps of the Capitol — hire a hall, if needs be. Hire professional media people, and get top people to volunteer, to do it right, the way the J6 Committee did, but not taking the time J6 could — we need to fly into action right away. And they will put private and public pressure on our congressional leaders to resist — to gum up the works in an organized fashion, to embarrass our Republican opponents and even our Democratic static friends into moving the congress into true opposition.

The leaders of the Resistance Council to actually lead. They will mobilize and organize all those who want to be part of the Resistance, while keeping the council leadership small enough to handle.

Who are the obvious candidates for membership in the leadership of the Resistance Council? Here are some starting names: AOC, Chris Murphy, Pete Buttigieg, Jamie Raskin, Adam Kinzinger, Bernie Sanders, Reuben Gallego, Jasmine Crockett. This council would plan the PR campaign and plan the congressional actions. They would raise money for legal support against actions the Trump administration will bring, and solicit lawyers to set up pro bono legal defense councils for all the charges Trump will bring.

The states will also need to organize themselves to resist — just today the Governor of Maine challenged Trump to his face, and he tried to bully her down — that’s who he is, would-be mobster. J.B. Pritzker has put himself forward. The Governors and state AG’s should start their own council and coordinate with the congressional Resistance Council. We need a whole bunch of Resistance Councils.

If it’s The War To Save The Republic, we have to act like it. Bring it on. Recognize it. Don’t run away from it. Organize and win. And keep it focused. It’s not just the liberals, although they are the ones I mentioned by name. There will be many others.

This is one fight that has to be won. And to win, it has to be organized. And to be organized, the let’s-wait crowd and the we-don’t-have-any-power crowd have to leave the stage and let the active ones come to the fore.

Budd Shenkin

Evil and Dumb, How Do We Spell The Name?

‪ Trump is so dumb he thinks the game is still making deals and making money (which he actually never could do.) So he joins Russia to shakedown Ukraine - Russia gets control and USA (and prob Trump privately) get rare earths. And he expects to be celebrated for a Mafia play. He thinks it's all money. ‪ We don't say "evil" much anymore; we clean it up with the more clinical "sociopathic." Which is fine, except I'd add also "psychopathic." But maybe "stupid, evil, very cruel" covers it well. But whatever terms we use, we need to act and resist. buddshenkin.blogspot.com/2025/02/will...

Doctors, Mothers And Daughters, Death and Caring, Writing

This essay is also available at: https://medium.com/@buddshenkin/mothers-and-daughters-doctors-and-death-4be81ebf460f

This isn’t a confession of matricide, but technically speaking, I did kill my mom.

Both JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine have one 1,200 word personal essay per issue. I used to avoid them. I thought, probably unfairly, that they were written by stuffy older men dispensing what they considered their wisdom, as some of my self-satisfied Harvard Medical School (HMS) teachers used to do. I think that opinion said more about me than it did about them. It also reflected the press of time and the relentless appearance of the journals in the mail every week. You took the journals in the hope that you wouldn't miss important things. You also hoped that each issue had nothing important so you could accomplish your self-assigned task expeditiously and just discard it – triaging limited time.

But that has changed. I still hope for articles without interest so I can clear the kitchen table more easily. Accomplishing tasks quickly will probably be a life-constant until I die – well, that's hopeful, isn't it? Still functional until the very end? Here's hoping. But now, instead of dismissing the essay, I look forward to them. I know that I have changed, but have the articles changed? Maybe. For one thing, a lot of them are now written by women. Women in medicine! Thank God for the women in medicine! Like it or not, women write differently from men, because like it or not, women are different from men. Talk about adding needed balance. Every patient should have a choice between a woman or a man for their doctor, because they're just different, not all the time, but lots of times. And we medical readers should have the same choice.

So in this current NEJM issue, Stanford woman neurologist and palliative care researcher , Hannah Kirsch, writes about killing her mother. See My Mother's Choices – https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2410639. She a hell of a writer, this one. So many of the 1,200 words writers now are really good – the liberal arts persist in medicine. Good words, punchy, each sentence counts. Great introductory sentence: This isn’t a confession of matricide, but technically speaking, I did kill my mom. Men can and do write like that, of course, and sensibilities are not segregated by sex. But one thing is segregated by sex. That thing is the relationship between mother and daughter.

There's just something about that relationship that's different. I read two books in the last couple of years that if you haven't read, you should, especially since they're not only great, they're short. One is Annie Ernaux's remembrance of her mother on the occasion of her death, A Woman's Story. She is raised by her ambitious mother in the working class of Yvetot, Normandy. Annie replaces a sister who died at age six. What is the effect of replacement? We don't know, but it affects all of them. We'll try again. They're trying again with me. Most of us carry the burden of expectations, they propel us forward, they give us a sense of mission that comes not just from us. I titled the book that one of my characters wrote in my unpublishable French novel, “Amour, Cadeau ou Fardeau ?” Love, gift or burden? My character, Juliette, means it in romantic love, but clearly, that's not the only love nor the only gift nor the only burden. Annie turns out to be very, very smart, and grows up to write books I love, books of genius, books worthy of the 2022 Nobel Prize for literature. But along the way, inevitably, her growth and excellence, fueled by her mother, draws her away from her mother. Her sensibilities change. Her social class changes. Her interests widen. Her conversation is at a higher level. Annie is bored at the narrow working class conversation around the family table when she returns from Rouen or other place of residence. It is the gulf her mother hopes for and then suffers from. Annie is dutiful. After her father dies and Annie is living in eastern France, her mother comes to live with her and her husband and her two sons. Grandmother takes care of the grandsons, meets some people, and it is one of the happiest times of her life, maybe her happiest time. When Annie moves to an anonymous Paris suburb around the Boulevard Périphérique, known as the Périph, that time is over. There are no friends to make here. So her mother moves away, back to Yvetot I think, and then she dies of Alzheimer's, and Annie reevaluates the long course of mother-daughter love. The closeness, the identification, the irritations, the impatience, the guilt, the duties, the rupture. Growing up. Love is such a mixture of contending feelings sometimes. Father and sons have it, sure, but not like mothers and daughters, I think.

The other book you have to read is Simone de Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death, another short book that is easily read. “Easy Death” is what someone says in all sincerity after her mom dies, but after what we've read, we understand it as an ironic title. I've come to think – is any death “easy?”

Simone gets more of her ambition from her rather unsuccessful father, I think, and from her inborn indomitable will – as a toddler she lies on her back on the floor and screams from frustration and no one can stop her – than from her very religious mother who easily accepts her place in a man's bourgeois world. When Simone loses her faith, she becomes a lost soul to her mother's anguish. When she grows into her life as perhaps the most notable woman of the 20th century – I think I love Simone – I think her mother gradually accepts her new status, but the bitterness of the gulf remains. I have to read the second volume of her memoir to really know what happened to them, but the first volume is striking and even lacerating. It must be hard to talk when you come to such different stations in life. But then her mother gets cancer and is going to die, and gradually does just that, Simone and her younger sister Poupette tending to her together. A dying mother, a mother who raised you, who you were so close to, who facilitated your rise in life, and who you left behind perhaps bitterly, who pissed you off, but a relationship of love you can't leave behind, it just sneaks around another corner. Her mother is not told she has terminal cancer, the doctors won't listen to slowing down their fruitless pursuit of cure, but then she must accept it even if unspoken. She sits in bed with one arm around Poupette and one arm around Simone and she says, “My girls. That's all I really want, my girls.” And I cry.

So now we have women in medicine, and they can write about their mothers. I heard about this one incident from a friend who hasn't written about it. A woman doctor friend of mine at HMS lost her mother last year to cancer. As her mother got sick, she needed tending to back home in the Southwest.. Their relationship had been fraught, especially as her mom had divorced and become a single mom with all the intimacy with a daughter that that can entail. Do you drop everything to tend to a mother with whom you have had a tenuous relationship? My friend did; she took leave and went back and tend to her mom, she was glad she did, but it was never easy. But she did what a daughter has to do. I'm not sure it brought resolution to their relationship; I suspect it didn't. But she did what was right, and I'm sure she did it with great compassion, because that's who she is.

Hannah's relationship with her mother was similarly fraught, and as part of her reflection, not to say resolution, she writes about the death by assisted suicide, movingly and beautifully. As for all of us who are doctors, when our parents or our wives or our husbands die, we are both daughters and doctors, husbands and doctors, and sometimes we are parents and doctors. Our HMS classmate Gerry Rogell presented us, his HMS classmates, just recently, this very same ambiguity and dilemma when his wife was ill with Covid. We are sons and daughters and husbands wives with special powers. As doctors we struggle with how close to get with our patients, how close we can afford to get, how apart we need to stay. We struggle each in our own way. I wonder if the special power, knowledge, makes it easier or harder. I think it made it easier for me when my wife was sick and dying – I was oriented to the field, and I did adapt to being instructed and leaning on caregivers and nurses, because as a pediatrician, we could all accept that I knew things as a doctor but didn't know things as a child's doctor. In my friend Gerry's case, it was a little harder, because he had to decide whether or not to press for a medical course that he thought might be indicated, and didn't know at that point whether to act as a doctor or a husband, and was tortured by that choice.

But in Hannah's case, dealing with a difficult mother with strong independence needs, just like Annie and Simone and Gerry, was it easier or harder? Actually, it seems to me that it was easier. She knew medical expectations. She knew endpoints. She had seen many courses that patients had taken. She could navigate the mother-daughter relationship with that information giving her perspective. As a doctor she knew how to talk, so instead of rejecting her mother's request instantly as impossible, she takes a minute and says, “What makes you ask that now?” And she continues, until the end, when her mother chooses not to surrender to decay but to choose herself when and how to go, and Hannah mixes the deadly elixir and gives it to her mother to drink.

I never let her, or any of the other people at her deathbed, perceive what roiled between my agonized detachment. I wanted someone else to be in charge, even though I couldn't let go of the iron control of the 'primary caregiver.' I wanted to inhale the dregs of the mixture in the hope of sleeping, not forever, but long enough to resolve the conflict between my personal desires and my professional commitment. I wanted to curl up in her lap, just the two of us in the room, and weep, begging her not to do this, telling her that I need her to tell me I'm her special girl, that I'm scared and need my mom.

And I cry.

Maybe you see why I'm not skipping the little personal essays anymore.

Budd Shenkin

To Thwart A Coup

 My son Peter sent me this podcast from Ezra Klein.

 https://youtu.be/K8QLgLfqh6s

Here is my response:

I agree, this is very good.  Thanks for calling my attention to it.  It's a call to sanity, but I'm still fearful that Trump will have all these powers.  The fork in the road will come when the courts rule against him and he disobeys, which is what he's setting up to do. I don't believe for a moment that he won't defy the courts. Andrew Jackson did it successfully, which led to the Trail of Tears.  Eventually his party petered out, but nowadays, I fear that won't happen.  I fear that partially because the Democrats are so weak and feckless.  They need to reorganize - I give one idea: https://buddshenkin.blogspot.com/2025/02/will-there-be-credible-resistance.html.

If you have a firehose of issues coming down from Trump, you need to respond in an organized way, and defend everything, speak up forcefully, explain and persuade the populace.  They should engage on Ukraine - Trump is now changing sides, making us Russian allies -- Presidential strength is greatest in foreign policy as you know.  The Dems need to address this, need to actively recruit Republicans - ask them if they are ready to support Communists.  This could be a real rift in the Republican party, but because "voters don't care about foreign policy," the uninspired Dems will instead concentrate on egg prices.

I find myself being frustrated with the Dems and even being angry at them.  I think it's because of team sports.   I expect the Cowboys to try to be strong; I don't criticize them for that.  But if the Niners don't mount a credible opposition, I'm frustrated with them for failing us.  Schumer and Jeffries have adopted a strategy of saying, "We have no power!"  They're planning to pin everything on the Republicans.  That's correct in a way, but the optics are awful - how do you inspire people by declaring "We have no power?"  That's why there needs to be a group of excellent, aggressive, eloquent Dems who organize themselves and dare the rest of the party to follow them.

I don't expect anything from the congressional Republicans, actually.  They are less representatives than they are paid agents - they are married to their jobs, their jobs depend on election funding, and with SCOTUS vetoing any election funding reform (SCOTUS bought and paid for by wealthy right wing), congressional Republicans are just paid agents.  But some of them might be embarrassed if they were held up as supporting Russian communists.  Try defending that one.  Or maybe I'm wrong and isolationism would prove to be more popular.

Will the Trump revolution succeed?  Are we really so soft that traditional democracy will be lost?  Will the increasing failures of government under Musk and Trump make people value government more, or will they take it as evidence that government sucks?  There are many forks in the road and that's hard to predict, but I tend to think about quality of leadership.  If strong and decisive leadership does not emerge on the Dem side, then I think our culture can collapse back to the racist past, at least to some extent.  This team is bent on destruction, and destruction is easy, it's building that is hard.  Can the South African apartheid metastasis that we're seeing now actually prove lasting in a US that has come so far since the 60's?  Is all that reversible?  It's hard to think that it is.

I guess in the end I have to be hopeful, to believe that the evolved culture of the US as we experience it where we live will prove durable.  I have to believe that there will be enormous pushback and that Trump and Trumpism will die, sooner or later.  I'm just hoping for sooner.  I'm hoping for leadership to emerge stronger than ever.  I have to believe that leadership will emerge from the states.  If Trump & Co. make the feds weak, then the states will become stronger, and leadership will emerge from there.

But in the end, who knows?

What do you think?  You have a certain reasonableness of levelheadedness that I always find bracing.  I'm so glad you majored in poli-sci.

 

Budd Shenkin

 

Will There Be A Credible Resistance?

 

I think a lot depends on how the Dems can organize themselves in resistance. Leaders must be allowed to emerge. Congressional Dem leadership now is old and abysmal.  They need a War Council, and regular Addresses to the Nation analyzing what's going on, and how it's a coup, an autogolpe, or a revolution, and pointing out in detail what they're doing and how they're lying about it.  

Who can do this?  Buttigieg can explain it, others are eloquent and passionate, but they are all either backbenchers, or sometimes governors.  They need to organize themselves as The Democratic Resistance, and challenge the rest of the Dems to follow and join them, or not.  That would capture the country's attention, give media somewhere to go, and set up for the lawsuits which are already progressing, and most importantly, for 2026 elections.  Each Dem would have to choose, are you an active resister, or not?  Through this, the candidate for the 2028 election, should there be one, would emerge.

What they obviously cannot do is to rely on their current congressional leadership.  Schumer and Jeffries might be effective insiders, but Schumer is an awful public speaker -- reads his remarks into the rostrum -- and Jeffries struggles.  Their task is to hold the Dems together within their chambers; swaying the nation is not in their remit.

Anyway, that's my take.  Even this might not work, because SCOTUS has already been captured, so many other courts (Aileen Cannon, Judge S. in Amarillo, etc.).  This War Council, plus the states, with active AG's and Governors in the blue states, are the last hope.  Popular movements, demonstrations, etc., I would think would only arise with good leadership explaining what is happening and gathering adherents that the people could rally around.  Remember what Allard Lowenstein had to do -- find a candidate.

Budd Shenkin

The Fruits Of Aging

 

As you get old, you accumulate wisdom.

As you get old, you make more mistakes, or continue with the old ones but they get worse.

Which is it?

I think it's both.

It's just like it's always been - you try your best, and try to forgive and get others to forgive your mistakes.

Sometimes it works.

How The World Is Organized -- The Trump Model

 

What is going on with Trump's view of the world? He wants to stop supporting Ukraine, is very iffy on NATO, hasn't said much about Taiwan, but wants to flex on Mexico, Canada, Panama? What's up?

I can't review all the different ways of organizing the world – not my area of expertise – but clearly we have had empires (Rome, China, British), and we have had configurations of independent states with balanced power(Europe after the Council of Vienna). We've had a system of international laws that recognize countries' boundaries and strive not to interfere internally in their affairs (never really respected). We've had a dual-centric world – USSR vs. USA in the Cold War. We've had systems where armed interventions are supposed to be abjured – post WW I. And so on. Some would say the world has always been organized by strict power, and ideas to stop war and rule by recognized rights is most a modern attempt. But as I say, it's not my field.

So, as far as I've been alive, the world has been dominated by the thought that we should have a universally recognized system of laws and avoid wars. At least, that's what I've seen. Now we have challenges to that, as the Chinese seem to say that this so-called system of rights and respect is hypocritical, and just hides the continuation of the long era of Western domination. And now, it seems, we have a new view, probably a view that would be called “realist,” from Trump.

That view seems to be this: We know that Trump has fancied himself a realist of the thuggery of the world. He has idolized gangsters. He thinks it realistic to understand that countries kill people, they just hide it. The states are all hypocritical, Trump thinks, they say one thing and do something else. The words are on the surface, but it's something else beneath.

He liked to hang out at construction sites at his father's buildings. The working class sees power and people being compelled, not cajoled and persuaded. He himself likes to bully. A lot. So, I think he sees the natural order of the world being based on power and ruthlessness. That would mean that strong states bully weak states, especially nearby ones. This leads to a multi-centric world where regional powers dominate their neighborhood. This is an ancient situation, where transportation and communication was none, or months, or years. In those days a regional power would think of themselves as a world power, because their worlds were small. Nowadays, we know better than to think ourselves isolated, but with the threat of nukes keeping world powers at a distance and enforcing limits, no one should really aspire to world domination, but they can aspire to regional domination.

Who is this reminiscent of? Well, that was the world Hitler envisioned. Let the Japanese dominate the East, let the USA dominate the Americas, and let Germany dominate Europe. Hitler couldn't see why others didn't agree. That's also – relevant to Trump – the view of the Mafia. Let one group dominate Buffalo and don't bother them, cooperate when possible. We keep Brooklyn and Queens, let others have New Jersey. We can compete in new areas, like Las Vegas, but we won't threaten the home territories of the other families. And in both these cases, Hitler and the mafia, force is the dominant influence.

So that's the way Trump sees the international organization. That's why he thought Putin's invasion of Ukraine was brilliant. He surely understands Xi's determination to take Taiwan, with Hong Kong already digested. He thinks it's just weak for the US to allow nearby weaker states to be independent – why don't we dominate them the way the USSR dominated Eastern Europe? It's our right, because we're strong. Mutual respect of borders and sovereignty is stupid and weak, to Trump's understanding.

And what do the leaders of these blocs do? They make sure they get themselves rich. Putin is reportedly the richest man in the world. I hear that he has a deal with each oligarch that he, Putin, personally, has a 50% interest in each of their enterprises. That's why Trump idolizes him. Of course! He's the strongest and that's what he deserves. He's due it. That's exactly what Trump thinks he's due. It's the way of the world, the true order, not this made up stuff about mutual respect and ideals. Realism.

So, no mystery. We don't interfere with the way other dominant states rule their area, and we don't care what they do. Human Rights? Gimme a break. That's made up stuff by the Sunday School crowd. Me, I'm a realist, Donald the Realist. He was the strongest in his family and he dominated them, he was the strongest in the Republican field, and now he's the strongest in the country. Don't give me that stuff about right and wrong.

For starters, Donald no doubt wants a 50% personal interest in the Panama Canal, and a 50% interest in each Canadian energy company.

Why not?

Budd Shenkin