Dilip Simeon's blog

Nelson is a retired Justice of the Montana Supreme Court and a member of the Legal Advisory Committee for Free Speech For People. Bonifaz is the co-founder and president of  Free Speech For People . It has been widely  acknowledged  that, upon swearing the Oath of Office,  President Donald Trump  would be in direct  violation  of the  foreign-emoluments clause  of the U.S. Constitution. Never heard of the foreign-emoluments clause? You’re not alone. It’s tucked away in Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution. It's clause number 8. It states, in pertinent part: "... no person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office or Title of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State.” Trump's Supreme Court Nominee Calls President's Attacks On Judge 'Demoralizing' Trump Assails Nordstrom for ‘Unfairly’ Dropping His Dau...

The end begins now Trump’s presidency is year zero in a new world order On Wednesday, the world changed. An idea of itself that the West believed in and promoted in the wake of two devastating world wars came to an end. Liberal values always work best when you are in the ascendant, and most Americans no longer feel in the ascendant. This is the start of the next stage of history, a triumph of the outsider. For Americans, the election result represents a victory for white nationalism, and for the idea that the majority can apply the values of identity politics to itself. Donald Trump’s attack on elites and institutions was secondary to this fact. His campaign made the majority feel as if they were a put-upon minority, and as in other countries, this won the vote. As a candidate, he was not a thinker but a reflector, a mirror. “I am your voice,” he told a delighted crowd when he won the Republican nomination. Ku Klux Klan announces Donald Trump victory parade as white supremacists...

In close up, on television, at a glance, with the volume down, Donald Trump can from time to time look like a president. That effect becomes less convincing the more you pay attention, though. Even under professional lighting, Trump reliably looks like a photographic negative of himself; on his worse and wetter days, he has the tone and texture of those lacquered roast ducks that hang from hooks in Chinatown restaurant windows.  The passing presidentiality of the man dissipates utterly in longer shots, where Trump can be seen standing tipped oddly forward like a jowly ski jumper in midair, or mincing forward to bum-rush an expert’s inconvenient answer with an incoherent one of his own, or just making faces intended to signal that he is listening very strongly to what someone else is saying. (These slapdash performances of executive seriousness tend to have the effect, as the comedian Stewart Lee once said of James Corden, of making Trump look like “ a dog listening to classical ...

One reason Democrats are bad at politics is that they concern themselves too much with facts and not enough with impressions. With Clinton’s “emails scandal”, they tried to show Clinton  had not technically violated the law , but having Barack Obama’s FBI actively investigating Clinton for possible criminal wrongdoing  looked terrible  regardless of the facts...  Left-leaning pundits love to “fact-check” Trump, as if proving that he has lied is in itself persuasive. But 2016 should have showed us how powerless “debunking” is next to “optics”. If you have a Democratic candidate who  looks  really corrupt, it doesn’t matter if they’re not. People don’t trust the press and they don’t trust politicians.  Imagine Biden running against Trump. Trump will run ads like  this , over and over.  Supporters of Joe Biden are unlikely to be persuaded by most of the common criticisms. They know he can be rambling and unintelligible. They know his record ...

NB: The unresolvable tension between a global economic order and a nation-statist political system produces regular political convulsions, of which the latest ultra-nationalist turn is the newest example. The ideologues of capitalism espouse complete freedom for Market Forces (Peace Be Unto Them) as the panacea for all ills, and insist that the state ought never to intervene in the economy. (What was demonetisation , by the way?!) They cannot see the irony of their demand for state intervention to ' commoditize those parts of human culture that should have remained outside the jurisdiction of the market - in particular, land, labor, and money' (see the article on Polanyi below).  Nor do they seem to notice that protectionist policies go against the grain of their own ideological utopia of total freedom for Market Forces ( Peace Be Unto Them) . In the late 19th century imperial Great Britain led the charge on behalf of free trade, and even the colonial government in India wa...

Let’s begin with the purely electoral aspect of Trump’s victory in November. He lost the popular vote by 65 million to 62 million, but that didn’t matter because he won the archaic Electoral College by 304 to 227. The Electoral College was established in the late 18th century to ensure that small (mainly agrarian, and at the time, largely slave) states could check the power of the larger urban industrial states. Trump lost the entire Northeast (New York state, Massachusetts, etc.) and the West Coast (California, etc) and won most of the states in between. Further, there are 220 million adults of voting age in the U.S., of whom 90 million did not vote at all, and studies have generally shown that the non-voters are overwhelming in the poorer half of the population and on specific issues (health care, welfare, etc.) are to the left of both the major Democratic and Republican Parties. Non-voting in the U.S. is not merely a radical gesture of “who cares”? but is a conscious poli...

There’s no point in judging Donald Trump by the standards of others. He obviously doesn’t care for ethics, the truth, allies, women or minorities. So let’s judge him on his own terms, shall we? There are three pillars to the temple that Trump has so carefully built around his most precious possession: himself. One is brand marketing, another is the masquerade of management expertise, and the third is the legal know-how that props up the other two. After just two weeks in the Oval Office, Trump has contrived to destroy his reputation on all three. Let’s start with litigation, not least because Trump has too. Faced with a series of federal courts blocking his Muslim ban, Trump has resorted to attacking and trash-Tweeting the federal judges who dare cross him. It has clearly been a troubling weekend for the 45th President of the United States. First he  derided  as a “so-called judge” the Republican appointee who blocked his Muslim ban nationwide. Then he seemed surprised th...

NB : The US President is threatening to unleash violent vigilantes on his political opponents; and to  suborn the police and military to secure his political goals. Violent American interventions across the world are no secret - here are some materials on Chile and Vietnam . Now, however, the US polity is imploding, just as the USSR imploded under the burden of its own unbearable tensions. Neo-Nazis and white supremacists are in full cry. Let us see how far they will go and whether Americans who love freedom and democracy will be able to thwart the so-called 'leader of the Free World' (what a joke) in his attempt to overthrow his country's constitution. DS What does a megalomaniacal president of the United States do when he’s cornered? We’ll soon find out. House Democrats are beginning a series of investigations and hearings about  Donald Trump . Senate Republicans have begun to desert him. Twelve defected on the wall. Seven refused to back Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. ...

Vladimir Putin has a plan for destroying the West—and that plan looks a lot like Donald Trump. Over the past decade, Russia has  boosted right-wing populists  across Europe. It loaned money to Marine Le Pen in France,  well-documented  transfusions of cash to keep her presidential campaign alive. Such largesse also wended its way to the former Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, who profited   “personally and handsomely ” from Russian energy deals, as an American ambassador to Rome once put it. (Berlusconi also shared a   240-year- old bottle  of Crimean wine with Putin and apparently makes ample use of   a bed  gifted to him by the Russian president.) There’s a  clear pattern : Putin runs stealth efforts on behalf of politicians who rail against the European Union and want to push away from NATO. He’s been a patron of  Golden Dawn  in Greece, Ataka in Bulgaria, and Jobbik in Hungary.  Joe Biden  warned about this...