It's Even Worse Than You Think

by David Cay Johnston

  Then there was the issue of jobs for veterans. As we’ve seen, Trump the candidate promised to be laser-focused on job creation.

  Upon taking office, Trump issued an executive order freezing the federal workforce. That hurts veterans. Federal civil service laws give veterans significant preferences in getting hired. As people retire or move on to other work, the federal government hires replacements, close to 100,000 people per year. More than 70,000 of them are veterans, including nearly 32,000 partially disabled vets. Studies done for Congress have shown that past hiring freezes, like the one President Ronald Reagan ordered in 1981, do not save money but add to the burdens on citizens and businesses as they deal with overwhelmed federal staffers and wait for both approvals and services. The federal workforce was not bloated, either. The executive branch employed a bit more than two million people when Trump took office, about the same as during the Carter, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush administrations, when the population was much smaller.

  Closing off federal employment for disabled veterans would only increase requests for the unemployability benefit that Trump proposed eliminating. In addition, the hiring freeze would have a second detrimental impact on veterans. The freeze would prevent the VA from hiring 300 more people to process veterans’ claims and provide health care and other services. Between 2012 and 2015, the Obama administration had hired more claims examiners as it cut the backlog of veterans’ requests for services from 536,400 to about 71,000. Reducing that to zero as Trump promised and then improving other services, however, was scuttled by the Trump budget plan.

  No opportunity to reduce veterans’ benefits was too small to escape the Trump budget team. The administration proposed to nickel-and-dime disabled veterans—literally.

  In the 1990s, Congress ordered the VA to round down to the nearest dollar when calculating benefit checks to veterans. That saved about $6 annually per veteran. That policy ended in 2013 under Obama. Trump’s budget called for restoring downward rounding. The annual savings would total about $20 million in 2018. Out of each dollar the VA spends, rounding down would save about a hundredth of a penny.

  While Trump was focusing on pennies, a violent political storm was brewing over much bigger issues of race, a storm he would do nothing to calm.

  The Road to Charlottesville

  “I am the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered,” Donald Trump said in 2015, not long after he launched his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists and murders.

  One of the great victories of the civil rights movement is that, in America, it has become unacceptable to espouse racist views publicly, though many people harbor them, sharing their biases only with those they trust. Many whites do not care to sit next to Latinos in a restaurant, fly with an Asian pilot, or report to a black woman boss.

  Not many people go so far as to support the Ku Klux Klan, as Trump’s father, Fred, was doing in 1927 when New York City police arrested him during a violent demonstration. But thanks to the ease of Internet communications, and laws in most states permitting people to walk around carrying assault rifles and other weapons of war, the current crop of neo-Nazis, skinheads, and various hard-core hatemongers can easily recruit their niche audiences while putting fear into the hearts of other Americans.

  The FBI and other law enforcement agencies have files on thousands of people associated with such groups. During the George W. Bush administration, Homeland Security and other federal officials warned that far-right hate groups posed a serious threat. The FBI and Homeland Security have a database of extremist attacks, which shows that from the day after 9/11 through the end of 2016, far-right extremists killed 106 people in America in 62 attacks, while violent self-professed Muslims killed 119 people in 23 separate attacks. The Southern Poverty Law Center tracks more than 900 such groups it regards as proselytizers of hate.

  A vastly larger group of white Americans is uncomfortable with the changes wrought by the civil rights movement and the subsequent liberating movements of women, gays, and other people they imagine are not like themselves. This truth reveals itself in the vile emails frequently made public in lawsuits over alleged discrimination and in subtle societal assumptions, such as when news reports specify the race of suspects who are other than Caucasian. All this falls under the broad rubric of white privilege, a social disease that is highly persistent and rarely discussed. Many white people are blinded by the presumed normality of their skin and the harm their inability to see others as equals causes everyone, including themselves, as revealed by the defensive statement, “I’m not a racist.”

  Millions of Americans watched live as the violence unfolded in Charlottesville as young men marched shouting Nazi slogans while anti-facists (or antifa)I counterdemonstrators stood their ground. They saw cell phone videos of the terrorist attack by a man driving a Dodge Charger that killed Heather Heyer, one of hundreds of mostly white counterprotesters who came to oppose the racists. Some may even have found amusing the images of a legion of young white men in khakis and polo shirts bearing backyard tiki torches burning scented mosquito repellent oil as they shouted Hitlerian slogans including “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.”

  The liberal columnist Eric Alterman accurately ridiculed them in The Nation as “Third Reich fantasy re-enactors.” Trump has a fondness for some of the racist marchers, the ones he repeatedly said were “fine people.”

  What Americans did not see on live television, however, were two equally ominous scenes. One was of a white man, a Ku Klux Klan leader from Baltimore, firing a shot at some of the people who came to oppose hatemongering. No one was hit by his bullet and he was later arrested.

  The other images were of a band of thirty-two men who had come down from New York State ready for war. They wore camouflage fatigues and military-grade combat boots. Slung over their shoulders were loaded military assault rifles with ninety backup rounds of ammunition. They strapped semiautomatic handguns to their hips. Their chests were protected with Level 3 body armor designed to stop the most widely used military assault rifle bullets and thrusts from bayonets. To protect their heads, they wore bullet-resistant Kevlar helmets with battlefield shooting glasses shielding their eyes. They carried water, two-way radios, and first-aid kits.

  “You saw the militia walking down the street, you would have thought they were an army,” Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe said, adding the militias “had better equipment than our State Police had.”

  On the first night in Charlottesville, hundreds of mostly young men, some wearing swastikas, marched past Congregation Beth Israel. Torches lit the way as they shouted the Nazi salute “Sieg Heil,” the Nazi slogan “blood and soil,” and other anti-Semitic chants, loudly pointing out the synagogue.

  The next day, during services, three men showed up in full combat gear. They paced back and forth on the sidewalk across the street. “Had they tried to enter, I don’t know what I could have done to stop them, but I couldn’t take my eyes off them, either,” the rabbi told congregation members later. Rabbi Zimmerman had hired a security guard and stationed him out front. “Perhaps the presence of our armed guard deterred them. Perhaps their presence was just a coincidence, and I’m paranoid. I don’t know.”

  In Virginia, it is perfectly legal to go about alone or in a pack dressed and equipped for warfare. Every American state allows some form of “open carry” for rifles and shotguns, a major shift from the gun control laws of the twentieth century, which in some states required rifles to be carried in the locked trunks of cars or that bullets be kept in a separate compartment from firearms.

  Among the states that ban open carry of handguns, the laws are shot through with almost as many holes as firing range targets. In Washington State, a court ruling forced changes to a Kitsap County ordinance; in county parks, people are free to carry firearms among the picnickers and sunbathers, but they may not use a BB gun or a slingshot. Only the nation’s capital has a strict law against open carry. While that is a local ordinance, it is
another example, perhaps, of Trump’s argument that the powerful in Washington take care of themselves first.

  Open carry laws and the ability to buy weapons of war over the counter were enacted before Trump took office. These policies come not from any popular will. Surveys show overwhelming support for strict gun controls, especially on handguns and weapons of mass killing, and banning the seriously mentally ill from access to guns, an issue we will return to.

  These laws are weakened because of the sustained and concentrated pressure brought by the National Rifle Association and the campaign donors aligned with it. While founded as an association of sportsmen, the NRA has become the slavish handmaiden of gun manufacturers.

  Its success has created a nation that in 2009 counted 315 million guns in private hands, more than one per person. That estimate by congressional researchers came out one month before the 2012 massacre of twenty first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Since then many states have weakened their gun laws.

  Throughout his campaign, Trump embraced guns and spoke against gun controls, often in the context of urging violence.

  In February 2016, Trump the candidate told a crowd in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that when encountering Trump protesters, they “should knock the crap out of them—seriously. Just knock the hell—I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise, I promise.”

  At a Las Vegas rally that same month, as a protester was being escorted from a rally, Trump lamented that “we’re not allowed to punch back anymore,” saying, “I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you that.” The billionaire said he missed the “good old days,” adding, “You know what they used to do to a guy like that in a place like this. They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”

  Trump even planted the idea of killing people who oppose him during a December 2015 rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Standing before a huge American flag, Trump referred to protesters, saying, “By the way, I hate some of these people, but I’d never kill ’em. I hate ’em. . . . these people, I’ll be honest—I’ll be honest, I would never kill them [laughter] I would never do that, ah, well . . .”

  As president, he used his power to ensure that about 75,000 people so mentally ill that they are not allowed control over their finances could easily buy guns. With no cameras, none of the fanfare of other actions, he signed into law a joint congressional resolution ending the background checks Congress required, at Obama’s urging, after the Sandy Hook massacre. Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, argued against the resolution. “Someone who can’t literally deposit their own paycheck probably can’t, or likely can’t responsibly, own and protect a gun,” he said.

  “The polls say I have the most loyal people,” Trump told an Iowa audience in January of 2016. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.” The next day Trump responded to criticism, telling another Iowa campaign rally he didn’t have time to be nice while campaigning, but that as president, “the demeanor would be a little bit different but, don’t worry, it would be the same attitude.”

  In June, after Omar Mateen slaughtered forty-nine people in a lone-wolf terrorist attack on a Florida nightclub, candidate Trump told a rally it would have been “beautiful” if the partiers had been armed.

  “If we had people, where the bullets were going in the opposite direction, right smack between the eyes of this maniac,” Trump said, his hand simulating a gun held between his eyes. “And this son of a bitch comes out and starts shooting and one of the people in that room happened to have [a gun] and goes boom. You know what, that would have been a beautiful, beautiful sight, folks.”

  His Woodlawn, Texas, audience went wild at the idea of a shootout between drunken nightclub patrons and a terrorist. But the remarks drew rebukes from many sides, including the National Rifle Association, which noted that guns have no place in bars. As he often does, Trump sort of, but not really, tried to walk back his remarks.

  Then, two months before the election, he also said Hillary Clinton could literally get away with murder. Clinton is “being so protected. She could walk into this arena right now and shoot somebody with 20,000 people watching, right smack in the middle of the heart, and she wouldn’t be prosecuted.” Then, mimicking a gun with his hand, he said, “Right smack in the middle of the heart and she wouldn’t be prosecuted, OK?”

  These incidents illustrate Trump’s casual use of violent imagery and how many words come out of his mouth without any filter, a situation that did not change after he became president. But they also go to a deeper problem in America, one that costs many lives and seems highly likely to cost many more as Trump spreads his violent rhetoric with the presidential seal as a prop.

  Trump is not the cause of the forces making gun violence and perhaps urban warfare more likely, but he is not calming things, either. The NRA and other absolutists say any restrictions on guns violate the Constitution. But no constitutional right is without limits. The Second Amendment makes no mention of guns, only that “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Following the logic of Second Amendment absolutists, each of us should be able to carry a howitzer or even a personal nuclear weapon. After all, they meet the definition of arms.

  The issues of gun violence are just as real as examples of Second Amendment overreach are absurd.

  Conflicts exist between the various guarantees in the Bill of Rights. For example, does a self-styled militia, like the New York State contingent in Charlottesville, interfere with the First Amendment freedom-of-religion rights of those attending Beth Israel for prayer? Would it matter if the armed men on patrol are shouting anti-Semitic slogans, like the marchers with the torches, but not brandishing their weapons? Does it matter that the militia is not recognized by any government? If it was recognized by a government, would the incidents at the synagogue interfere with the worshippers’ First Amendment rights of religion and assembly? Does it matter that states, which under a Constitutional law concept known as incorporation are subject to the full Constitution, have elevated the opportunity for people with weapons to intimidate those exercising their First Amendment right to assemble peaceably or worship?

  If and when a confrontation like Charlottesville turns into a bloody shootout, will it prompt any demand to amend gun laws? Will it provoke a serious debate about how the Framers of the Constitution, who lived in an era of single-shot long rifles owned by a mostly rural population, could not have contemplated city streets where packs of men flaunt military-style AR-15 rifles designed only for rapid killing?

  Trump surely will never support limiting the types of guns sold or their open display. We know this because he said so three months after assuming office, when he became the first president since Ronald Reagan to address the NRA leadership. “As your president, I will never, ever infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” Trump promised. “Never, ever. Freedom is not a gift from government; freedom is a gift from God.”

  The deaths at Sandy Hook and in Orlando and Charlottesville weigh unequally on the consciences of American policymakers. They apparently trouble Trump little or not at all. He did not attend Heyer’s funeral, which could have made a powerful statement against those who promote hate and strengthen a national sense of conscience about hate crimes.

  Just hours after Heyer was killed, Trump spoke from his New Jersey golf course clubhouse. His original intent for “this small press conference” was to sign a veterans health care bill, but after a few moments Trump switched to denouncing the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence” in Charlottesville.

  Had he stopped there, his words would have been viewed as the kind of healing comment Americans have come to expect of presidents after such awful events. But Trump went off script, adding an impromptu line that negated those words while giving aid and comfort
to the racists he had just seemed to be condemning.

  “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence—on many sides,” he said, pausing for a moment and then using his hand for emphasis as he repeated “on many sides.”

  Trump made no mention of neo-Nazis, skinheads, and racists. This failure to identify, much less blame, was in sharp contrast to his long history of instantly blaming Muslims after various terrorist attacks in Europe, Kansas, California, and Florida.

  The Nazis and racists quickly declared the president’s words to be exactly what they had hoped to hear. They kept up that position as Trump flip-flopped through clarifying comments over the next few days.

  He read one statement in which he looked like a hostage making a video when the captive reads words but his body language, tone, and attitude show that his actions are being forced. The next time he spoke he went on the attack against journalists, defending his remarks and insisting he had done the right thing in his first remarks, which would include his turning his back on the reporters he had summoned to a press conference, walking off when they asked questions to clarify his original position.

  To the hatemongers this first statement and what followed were taken as more wink-wink reassurances from Trump that with him in the White House their movement was in official favor. They told their members that Trump had to throw some rhetorical bones to the race-mixing crowd, but that his remarks made it clear that their movement was ascendant because they had an ally in the Oval Office. And they warned that the day was drawing closer when blacks, Asians, Jews, Mexicans, homosexuals, and many young women should fear being rounded up, or worse.

  Moments after Trump first spoke, the Daily Stormer, an American Nazi website that promotes making America a whites-only Christian nation, thanked Trump for blaming “many sides” for the violence rather than its readers: