alias Bruce.

The midterms proved that most voters don’t want Trump. The GOP is betting it won’t matter.

The Democrats have taken the House. Good. It will save lives. Some of us who would suffer and die under GOP-ruled policies on health care, policing, poverty, and poisoning of our air and water will instead live longer lives because of particular bills that Trump and his supine party will be unable to ratify. You and I awoke this morning to a better reality than we feared.

But that is not the only truth today. Here are some others:

- The Electoral College is the Trump Party’s last weapon. Money, male rule, and racism are the traditional toxins that have prevented the United States from being a democracy. Structurally, the Electoral College is the hangman’s bridge for all travelers in American government. Virtually no seekers of the presidency cross it intact without proving allegiance to those who stand to lose money or power if their policy needs are not met. Trump, as Charles Blow has said, represents a war: money’s last hope of directing the rage of non-rich white males at someone other than the white rich super-minority whose explosively greedy choices have decimated what remains of non-educated white privilege. Aside from white rage and male crotch-clutching, today’s Republican Party platform of enabling rich cheaters offers nothing — nada, zero — that non-college-educated white Americans can embrace or believe. From omnivorous political rodents like Mitch McConnell to self-promoting brayers like Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh, the sole remaining salable alternative to a progressive money-shouldn’t-rule pitch is a white-or-male-must-rule pitch. That’s all that the CEOs have left to offer before the incessantly climate-heated, increasingly brown, increasingly young and non-rich population of the United States inevitably surges progressive. The Electoral College, whereby states secure representation without regard to population, is the last anachronism protecting the artificial dominance of old white racist senators and presidents in America. It elected Trump in 2016 — where he lost the popular vote — and it will, unjustly, thanks to Republican white and rural gerrymandering, re-elect him in 2020, absent some sea change of popular revolt.

- Today’s institutional Democratic Party will not lead. It will follow. You already know more about this than any pundit needs to tell you. From Bill Clinton’s smarmy supply-side myths to Hillary Clinton’s empty corporate “Stronger Together” jingle to Nancy Pelosi’s and Chuck Schumer’s we-can’t-go-there calculus of mannered self-censoring to the DNC’s sabotage of Bernie Sanders’ actual progressive momentum, the institutional Democrats have excruciatingly shown us that they and their donors forbid authenticity about how corporate-funded policy actually works. Key Democratic candidates who won this season — like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — led on their own, defiant of party norms. Key progressives who lost succumbed to plain old institutional corruption (as with Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, whose opponent used his official position to implement policies undermining her voters) or, to my mind, to bad “moderate” advice (as with Beto O’Rourke, who inexplicably met a bloodthirsty Ted Cruz with soft anecdotes about voters’ family stories instead of a savaging of Cruz’s empty and corrupt claims. Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic Party, terrified of the gall it takes to piss off today’s corporate DNC donors with passionate truths about the corporate-funded modern American pretense of democracy, will, in future history, appear as the fading rear guard of small-d democratic values. True leadership will come, and is already emerging, from those who dare to run and win (or lose) on honest arguments about corporate power. At some point in the future, this truthful baseline will become a new normal, which the fearful inheritors of today’s DNC will then timidly claim as their own.

What will make the difference is what you and I now do, in public as we face politicians and police, and in private at our gatherings of family and coworkers and friends. It has happened at decisive moments in all repressive regimes.

Our move.

Here is the good news about Trump.

Since the 24-7 information feed from Western civilization’s fast-disintegrating way of life is disheartening beyond description, here, for you and me, are two facts about Trump of which we can remind ourselves in our daily struggles to both guard our inner lives against his toxicity and shut down his regime for good.

1.) The first, and maybe obvious, piece of good news is that, with few exceptions, people who have associated themselves with Donald Trump in his real estate/media/political career ultimately end up hating him and, often, wanting to hurt him. Like a mob boss with a memory disorder, Trump constantly creates new lethal enemies by simply being himself: a temptingly powerful but utterly crooked operator who will tell anyone anything and deny it the next day. Every month these days, the landscape is crawling with more characters who sold themselves out for Trump only to awaken gasping in swamp graves. Perennial enemies are worse than zombies: you can’t kill all of them.

2.) The second, and more broadly uplifting, good news is that American corporate rule, represented most ruthlessly by the Republicans (although the Democrats follow not too far behind as a timid second), has become so self-destructively greedy that it now has only two remaining plausible pitches it can make to try to dissuade the non-rich from storming the estates of the one percent. One of these last-ditch offerings is Trumped-up fake populism that admits that the system is rigged while offering ravaged post-industrial want-to-be-working people the same old disproven trickle-down lies of lower taxes for the rich and permissiveness toward dirty and rapacious industry. The other is white patriarchal fear and hatred toward women, blacks, browns, LGBTQ people, Muslims, and other targets for the displaced rage of a Caucasian American constituency that has subsisted on a manufactured sense of superiority for centuries. What is nefariously effective about the second option is that it not only distracts angry white people from attacking the rich but also alienates them from the very allies they need in order to have any hope of making America the fair and prosperous place they want it to be.

To be sure, this is one hell of a trap for non-rich Americans of all genders, colors, orientations, and backgrounds.

But it also shows that voracious corporate monarchy is just about out of options for successfully explaining itself to you and me as we pay the price for its suicidal destructiveness.

We can work with that opportunity.

Why Trump is the death of white men as we know them.

Smart people keep saying this but that’s because reality keeps shouting it: Trump is part of nature’s answer to the temporary global authority of white males who have massive treasuries and armies but tiny appendages of social perception.

There Trump is, braggingly brushing what he calls “dandruff” off the shoulder of French president Emmanuel Macron, a younger white male who thinks he can save the burning clubhouse, or at least inherit membership points. There Trump is, making his pear-shaped golf swing at his Florida swamp playground while he brays the planet into incompatibility with human life. There Trump is, lavishing sick job-starved white men with shamelessly wicked promises about coal mines and winning wars and grabbing women by their privates.

I fear it will get worse before it gets better. America, with its 18th-century patrician presumption of noblesse oblige, hasn’t yet had time to create a working model for addressing bad monarchs.

But make no mistake: Trump is the last titanic white man, the final Caucasian male officiate ranting oaths from the lifeboat, the end of the line for a brand of capitalist maleness that is rotting on the shelf in a rapidly-browning and broader-gendered market of humanity.

Every white male who cuts you off on the highway, or who floors his burp-tuned exhaust all the way to the next red light, or who votes to economically screw himself in order to savor a momentary blow at brownness or femaleness, is screaming, “This world is killing who I thought I was, and I don’t want to die.”

That goes with the territory when any animal stakes out unsustainable turf.

Being unaware of the world will kill you every time.

Trump is the monster child of white male immunity.

This is tortuously obvious unless you live in a bubble of white male obliviousness, in which case this message, like much of today’s American reality, will escape you.

But despite its having been repeatedly shrieked by gobsmacked commentators of color since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, it still needs to be said, again and again: Trump’s presidency itself is ranting, babbling proof of the official immunity of white men to standards of common decency and competency to which people of color, and women, and other non-members of America’s traditional ruling cabal, are held.

To me, as an educated and, most days, civil black American male, each morning that I awaken to Trump’s continued presence in the Oval Office is a hard knee to the gut. It is a wicked daily reminder of the monster baby that white male American power has become after five centuries: foul, infantile, brutally entitled, cluelessly empowered. Like an infant who pumps his fist at his own genius at having been born.

No American president of color would have his or her fitness for office still subject to debate after one month, let alone one year, of boasted sexual assault and proven continual lying and blatant economic conflicts of interest and increasingly unhinged and crude conduct that mocks even the pretense of presidential mettle. Such a disgrace of a president, if brown, would be gone – censured, condemned, impeached – within weeks, if that. Even Barack Obama – who, like many black achievers, brought an exponentially excessive degree of intellect and tact to a job for which far lesser whites are readily accepted – would have immediately been kicked to the curb for even one of the uncounted obscenities that Trump has acted out to date. And even with Obama’s impeccable conduct and qualifications and diction, his very presence as president still brought the racist white-rage constituency back into the streets.

Trump is a mentally ill, abusive, delusional, brazenly racist and misogynist, recklessly dishonest, stupid, corrupt human being who, by virtue of his being white and male and rich and conveniently enraged, won an election via the archaic Electoral College (while still losing the popular vote) in a country where the two corporate parties left the field wide open to any player audacious enough to utter the obvious but forbidden truth that the system is rigged.

And now that very system is up against itself: how does it eject the uncontrollable racist maniac who co-opted hidden white rage, but at the same time continue to deflect the rage of white voters away from the white rich?

It’s as if some greater power is asking white supremacy to fish or cut bait.

Another back-breaking reason why men can’t let the Democratic Party speak for us.

So now the Democratic Party learns, once again, in an awful but necessary series of exposures, that it has near-zero credibility in pretending to stand up for women.

This time the Designated Kinder Money Party went for the kill against a sickening, misogynist, sitting duck of a target: Roy Moore, a creature who, as a judge, pimped out the Constitution to succor white supremacy and anti-LGBTQ hatred, and who, decades ago as an up-and-coming assistant district attorney, reportedly sweet-talked a 14-year-old girl away from her mother in the hallway of a courthouse so he could convince her to secretly meet him away from her home and drive her to a place where he stripped down and fondled her through her underwear before she was able to make it stop. The first time.

Problem is, the Kinder Money Party forgot, as entitled bosses often do, that its own flank was just as vulnerable on matters of gender justice as that of the Republicans. And Republican and pro-Trump operatives recognized – as mercenaries and misanthropes usually do – that the overwhelmingly male Dems, including some of their liberal champions, had, of course, the very same brutal penile boss-male histories rattling in their closets. Hello, Al Franken and John Conyers.    

The supreme irony here is that what now gives Repubs and Trumpists their leverage in catapulting Democratic fellow abusers of women through the windshield is their own Republican, amoral, mercenary willingness to use all available ammunition – including the very crimes of which they themselves are perennially and viciously guilty – to implicate and incapacitate Democrats. Do Steve Bannon and the other bottom feeders who fuel the right-wing political hit-man machinery care in the least about the continued millennia of rape, abuse, and dominance of women by men? Please.

What we have here is one wing of the Male Dominate-Women Club prosecuting another rival wing of that same fraternity because it can.

It's not that it is intrinsically Democratic (or Republican, although the Republican ethos is more hospitable to raw patriarchy) for men to behave this way. It's that it has become part of the literal body politic of the Democratic Party as it has come to exist. In the same way that corporate patronage has become a calmly-accepted given for any national candidate's gaining even a foothold of power in either party.

New Jersey State Senator Diane Allen, R-7th Legislative District, said yesterday on national radio that it will take both determined women and committed men to break this outmoded political lock on gender authority.

Speaking as a man and as a citizen, I'll second that. We progressives can do better than the prison of today’s Democratic Party, whether we create momentum with which it is forced to catch up or we displace it altogether.

The parties of money and legacy may not see any other choices. But the rest of us can.

It’s time America stopped lying about Trump.

Enough already of this ceaseless business of shock, horror, and “can he last?” gibbering among America’s gobsmacked journalists and politicians.

I get it that many in the news and electoral industries are bursting their brains trying to make sense of Trump’s rampaging wickedness and seeming immunity to accountability.

But come on, CNN and Democratic Party. Your outraged perplexity is of no damn help here. Had you listened at any point prior to November 8, 2016, tens of millions of Americans could have bluntly filled you in on what we’re dealing with here and what we have to do about it.

For starters, here are three truths that are well understood by the vast majority of Americans – including many white and brown voters, Clinton and Trump voters, Sanders voters, and people who didn’t bother to vote at all:

Trump is not a horrible accident or a foreign invasion. Sure, clandestine Russian boudoir videos and hacked electronic polling systems and malleably anti-informed voters and predatory fake news algorithms on social media all helped set the stage for the Trump presidency. But Trump began when the first white plantation lackey chased the first brown escaped slave into the swamp for money. Trump is every white American who has ever whipped, jailed, feared, fled, lynched, envied, and depended upon brownness as a foil for his or her own invented identity of oppositeness. Trump is the nation’s oldest perpetual offspring: reborn again and again to the embered white demands of cotton and the Reconstruction backlash and Jim Crow and the Nixonian Silent Majority and the urban-aimed War on Drugs and The Wall. The vacuum of insatiable whiteness re-creates the need. Trump provides this moment’s satisfaction. Trump is the youngest 400-year-old American alive. Accidental and contrived? Hell, no. Trump is intrinsically organic to the American diet.

The United States is not a democracy. This is blasphemy to well-meaning campaign donors who have summer homes along the nation’s finest beaches. But it is unbearably obvious to the rest of us. Twenty-first-century America is not even within screaming distance of democracy. The flagrant rule of money over politics has made American democracy an ad slogan and a joke. The United States is a mega-plutocracy whose elite is so surreally wealthy that it excretes sufficient waste to keep its suppressed majority high above the world’s average standard of living. Today’s American corporate monarchy has so far managed to keep a relatively privileged but still abused and suffering white body politic obeisant to unfairness – as long as these white subordinates get the share of privilege to which they have learned from experience to feel entitled.

Trump did not win with lies. Trump won by digging his filthy incisors into a truth that the money wing of the Democratic Party wouldn’t touch: the system is rigged. Modern corporate capitalism is a king’s game that has as much to do with free and fair competition as leprosy has to do with flawless skin. I know: duh. Virtually every working and non-working person in America knows this – except for those who have canyons full of money and those who aspire to. Trump said it aloud – The System Is Rigged – and he said it with a raw and bitter rage that played perfectly to a group of roundly cheated white folks who can’t yet admit that their role as racial overseers is soon to be history. Bernie had a compelling structural prescription (watch his devastatingly detailed policy rundown, at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, of how to cure us of profit-driven health care) and a passionate presence, his awkward-white-guy pedagogy and shortage of mainstream traction notwithstanding, and he could have beaten Trump had the Democratic National Committee not vetoed his opportunity to do so. And Hillary, from her “Stronger Together” jingle on downward, was an exercise in noncommittal sloganeering that inspired legions of passionate hopefuls to stay at home on Election Day. The tragedy of Trump for our country is that he won by dishonestly co-opting the economic populist message that the corporate Democratic Party was afraid to touch – and that he then blended it with brutal racism and misogyny as insurance with his bitter core audience.

The good news, amid the current and future horrors, is that on the day when a charismatic, media-savvy progressive dares to unapologetically own a non-bigoted, f**k-you narrative toward today’s American monarchy, there will be tens of millions of citizens who have reason to listen.

Laurie Kash's film about the Washington, DC Women's March.

My filmmaker friend and colleague Laurie Kash made this film of the Women's March in Washington DC, January 21, 2017. Full disclosure: I'm in it. Watch it anyway. It is a beautiful portrait of national and global resistance.

 

This is how stupid Trump thinks his followers are:

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe the easily-disproved “alternative fact” that Trump's inauguration crowd in DC was not dwarfed by Obama's in 2008 or by the Women's March in 2017.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that giving brown people less will give struggling white people more – while the rich boldly suck up even more of virtually everything.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that going back to giving more power to for-profit health insurance companies will somehow, for the first time ever, give people more generous choices at lower prices.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that you can gut government (e.g., freeze federal hiring) and wildly expand it (e.g., build a wall, prosecute women for abortion, enforce a ban on Muslims) at the same time.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that suicide bombers and shooters are a greater danger to each of us than more poisonous air, water, and food.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that virtually all of the reputable climate scientists in the world are scammers and that the handful of climate denial scammers are telling the truth.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to believe that a white serial bankrupter who stiffed contractors and ran a phony college is a better ally than a black president who lowered unemployment and favored a higher minimum wage.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to trust a notoriously greedy billionaire because he repeats the obvious truth that “the system is rigged,” even after he fills his cabinet with greedy billionaires and brazenly pursues policies that favor CEOs over everyone else.

- Trump thinks his followers are stupid enough to continue to cheer on the Trump regime’s increasingly brutal scapegoating (e.g., of women, Muslims, blacks, brown immigrants, and LGBT people) while Trump’s billionaire policies lay waste to the lives of working white people.

None of this is new. Dictators thrive on telling bald-faced lies to desperate people.

But what we don't know is: How many Trump followers will see through the con? How many of we Americans as a whole will actively risk being targeted, fired, jailed, or worse to protect our futures and that of our kids? And how many journalists will actually fight – and by that I mean put their careers and possibly their physical safety at risk – for what is provably true and morally non-negotiable?

Photos from the Women's March in Washington DC, 1/21/2017

I shot these today at the Women's March in DC.

Videos I shot at the Women's March in Washington DC, 1/21/2017

I shot these videos at today's Women's March in DC. At the latest count more than 500,000 people marched in DC -- double the number that attended the Trump inauguration -- and more than 1 million marched globally.