Trump has always been a president untroubled by his contradictions. When the stock market is up, he takes his bow center stage.  When it’s down, he blames Jerome Powell, his appointment as Chair of the Federal Reserve Board.  Conventional wisdom discounts either position.  “…

With the Democrats in control of the U. S. House, President Donald Trump seems to be reviving his base with fiery rhetoric.  We all know who members of that base are — Woebegone innocents of earlier days, a time when, if corn prices flourished, so did the nation. As a kid, my f

Donald Trump doesn’t reason like a typical politician and has no fiscal discipline, says David Hoppe, Paul Ryan’s former chief of staff.  (“Hey, Paul Ryan, What’s Up?” by Anna Edgerton, Bloomberg Businessweek, Dec. 17, 2018, pg. 40.)  Hoppe blames Trump for a looming finan

In my freshman year in college, I discovered The Communist Manifesto was on my reading list.  After years of hearing the book was pure evil, I gasped.  A few pages into the material, however, and  I learned what I’d been told was nonsense. What’s wrong comaraderie?  Coca-Cola

Monika Bauerlein, CEO of Mother Jones, thinks President Donald Trump’s apparent madness has method in it.  (Why Does the Press Keep Helping Trump?” by Monika Bauerlein, Mother Jones, Jan/Feb 2018 pg. 5.)  She accuses him of spinning the truth each day, not to influence, but to c

The week of George Herbert Bush’s funeral showed us an America divided.  Republicans, the party of disgruntled whites, lionized the deceased president in an effort to reclaim the moral high ground.  Democrats spent their time pointing to the gaping disparity between the conduct of

Recently, I sat down to lunch at a gathering of former colleagues, all of them eager to discuss the outcome of the 2018 midterm elections. Several expressed hope for the future, but one skeptic reminded us of the numerous executive orders President Donald Trump had signed in the past

Recently, someone posted a remark by playwright Harold Pinter on Facebook.  It read, “How can you write a happy play? Drama is about conflict and general degrees of perturbation, disarray. I’ve never been able to write a happy play…”  I did a thesis on Pinter when I was

Nobody likes a multi-billionaire who stiffs his workers.  Donald Trump accuses Jeff Bezos of greed and Bernie Sanders agrees, suggesting a man who pockets $157 billion a year while his warehouse workers live on food stamps is a man whose conscience is questionable.*  While Trump’s

Weaponizing anger is a dangerous game.  Bernie Sanders tried it in the last Presidential election and so did Donald Trump.  Trump did it better and he remains a beacon for those who feel disenfranchised.  What both candidates did was tap into the residue loathing still with us from