Early Saturday morning, March 4, the 45th president of the United States alleged in a series of  tweets that former president Barack Obama orchestrated a “Nixon/Watergate” plot to tap Trump’s phones at his Trump Tower headquarters last fall in the run-up to the election. Trump concluded that the former president is a “Bad (or sick) guy!”

Sunday morning, Trump called for a congressional investigation.

Trump cited no evidence for his accusation.

Folks, we’ve got a huge problem on our hands. Either:

1. Trump is more nuts than we suspected – a true delusional paranoid. Trump’s outburst was triggered by commentary in the “alt-right” publication, Breitbart News, on Friday, which reported an assertion made Thursday night by right-wing talk-radio host Mark Levin suggesting Obama and his administration used “police state” tactics last fall to monitor the Trump team’s dealings with Russian operatives.

If this is what triggered Trump’s tantrum, we’ve got a president willing to put the prestige and power of his office behind baseless claims emanating from well-known right-wing purveyors of lies.

Which means Trump shouldn’t be anywhere near the nuclear codes that could obliterate the planet, or near anything else that could determine the fate of America or the world.

2. The second possibility is the Obama administration did in fact tap his phones. But if this was the case, before the tap could occur it’s highly likely Trump committed a very serious crime, including treason.

No president can order a wiretap on his own. For federal agents to obtain a wiretap on Trump, the Justice Department would first have had to convince a federal judge that it had gathered sufficient evidence of probable cause to believe Trump had committed a serious crime or was an agent of a foreign power, depending on whether it was a criminal or foreign intelligence wiretap.

In which case we have someone in the White House who shouldn’t be making decisions that could endanger America or the world.

3. The third possible explanation for Trump’s rant is he was trying to divert public attention from the Jeff Sessions imbroglio and multiple investigations of Trump associates already found to have been in contact with Russian agents during the election, when Russian operatives interfered with the election on Trump’s behalf.

Maybe he’s trying to build a case that the entire Russian story is a plot concocted by the Obama Administration – along with the intelligence agencies and the mainstream press – to bring Trump down. This way, he can inoculate himself against more damaging evidence to come.

But if it’s all a big show to divert attention and undermine the credibility of the intelligence agencies and the press, Trump is willing to do anything to keep his job – even if that means further dividing America, undermining trust in our governing institutions, and destroying the fabric of our democracy.

So there you have it. We have a president who is either a dangerous paranoid who’s making judgments based on right-wing crackpots, or has in all likelihood committed treason, or is willing to sacrifice public trust in our basic institutions to further his selfish goals.

Each of these possible reasons is as terrifying as the other.

For Democrats to be the only ones sounding the alarm risks turning it into the new normal of partisanship. For Obama himself to respond would only dignify it.

So the responsibility falls to Republican leaders to stand up and call this what it is: Dangerous demagoguery.

Former Republican presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, former Republican senators and members of Congress, and current Republican senators and members of Congress, must have the courage and decency to stop this outrage.

We are in a serious crisis of governance, and their voices are critical.

It seems an eternity ago but it was only last Tuesday night when Donald Trump addressed a joint session of Congress and stuck to the teleprompter without going off the deep end – eliciting rapturous praise from the media. 

“Donald Trump at his most presidential,“gushed NBC; “a recitation of hopes and dreams for the nation,” oozed NPR; “the most presidential speech Mr. Trump has ever given — delivered at precisely the moment he needed to project sobriety, seriousness of purpose and self-discipline,” raved the New York Times; “he did something tonight that you cannot take away from him. He became president of the United States,” rhapsodized CNN’s Van Jones.

The bar was so low that all Trump needed to do was not sound nuts and he was “presidential.”

But that all ended Saturday morning when the old Trump – the “birther,” the hatemonger, the thin-skinned paranoid, the liar, the reckless ranter, the vindictive narcissist, the whack-o conman – reemerged in a series of unprecedented and unverified accusations about his predecessor. 

In truth, the old Trump was there all along, and he will always be there. He’s unhinged and dangerous. The sooner congressional Republicans accept this, and take action to remove him – whether through impeachment or the 25th Amendment – the better for all of us.

Trump’s 10 Steps for Turning Lies into Half-Truths

Earlier this year the Wall Street Journal’s editor-in-chief insisted that the Wall Street Journal wouldn’t label Trump’s false statements as “lies.” Lying, said the editor, requires a deliberate intention to mislead, which couldn’t be proven in Trump’s case. 

But Donald Trump is the most lying president we’ve ever had, and he seems to get away with it. Here’s his 10-step plan for turning lies into near truths:

Step 1: He lies.

Step 2: Experts contradict him, saying his claim is baseless and false. The media report that the claim is false.

Step 3: Trump blasts the experts and condemns the media for being “dishonest.”

Step 4: Trump repeats the lie in tweets and speeches. And asserts that “many people” say he’s right.

Step 5: The mainstream media start to describe the lie as a “disputed fact.“

Step 6: Trump repeats the lie in tweets, interviews, and speeches. His surrogates repeat it on TV and in the right-wing blogosphere.

Step 7: The mainstream media begin to describe Trump’s lie as a "controversy.”

Step 8: Polls show a growing number of Americans (including most Republicans) believing Trump’s lie to be true.

Step 9: The media start describing Trump’s lie as “a claim that reflects a partisan divide in America,” and is “found to be true by many.”

Step 10: The public is confused and disoriented about what the facts are. Trump wins.

Don’t let Trump’s lies become near truths. Be vigilant. Know the truth, and spread it. The media should stop mincing words. Report Trump’s lies as lies.

Boycotting Trump

Both Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus, among other retailers, have dropped Trump brands, both Ivanka’s and her father’s. Their decisions came amid calls for a boycott against retailers that carry Trump products.

Macy’s dropped Donald Trump’s clothing line early in his campaign after he called Mexican immigrants “killers” and “rapists.“ Now Macy’s is under increasing pressure to drop Ivanka’s as well.

Travis Kalanick, Uber’s CEO, quit Trump’s economic advisory council after he was pressured by consumers and employees. That came after Trump’s Muslim ban and #deleteuber went viral.

Keep the pressure on. Let’s make it unprofitable to work with Trump. Boycott Trump. Reject companies that do business with Trump. Boycott companies whose CEOs collaborate with Trump. 

You need to be both a political activist and a consumer activist.

Go to www.grabyourwallet.org for a complete list of companies to boycott.

7 Signs of Tyranny

As tyrants take control of democracies, they typically do 7 things:

1. They exaggerate their mandate to govern – claiming, for example, that they won an election by a “landslide” even after losing the popular vote. They criticize any finding that they or co-conspirators stole the election. And they repeatedly claim “massive voter fraud” in the absence of any evidence, in order to have an excuse to restrict voting by opponents in subsequent elections.

2. They turn the public against journalists or media outlets that criticize them, calling them “deceitful” and “scum,” and telling the public that the press is a “public enemy.” They hold few, if any, press conferences, and prefer to communicate with the public directly through mass rallies and unfiltered statements (or what we might now call “tweets”).

3. They repeatedly lie to the public, even when confronted with the facts.  Repeated enough, these lies cause some of the public to doubt the truth, and to believe fictions that support the tyrants’ goals.

4. They blame economic stresses on immigrants or racial or religious minorities, and foment public bias or even violence against them. They threaten mass deportations, “registries” of religious minorities, and the banning of refugees.

5. They attack the motives of anyone who opposes them, including judges. They attribute acts of domestic violence to “enemies within,” and use such events as excuses to beef up internal security and limit civil liberties.

6. They appoint family members to high positions of authority. They ppoint their own personal security force rather than a security detail accountable to the public. And they put generals into top civilian posts.

7.They keep their personal finances secret, and draw no distinction between personal property and public property – profiteering from their public office.

Consider yourself warned.

When Donald Trump gave a speech last Friday at Boeing’s factory in North Charleston, South Carolina – unveiling Boeing’s new 787 “Dreamliner” – he congratulated Boeing for building the plane “right here” in South Carolina.

It’s pure fantasy. I’ll let you know why in a moment.

Trump also used the occasion to tout his “America First” economics, stating “our goal as a nation must be to rely less on imports and more on products made here in the U.S.A.” and “we want products made by our workers in our factories stamped by those four magnificent words, ‘Made in the U.S.A.’”

To achieve this goal Trump would impose “a very substantial penalty” on companies that fired their workers and moved to another country to make a product, and then tried to sell it back to America.

The carrot would be lower taxes and fewer regulations “that send our jobs to those other countries.”

Trump seems utterly ignorant about global competition – and about what’s really holding back American workers.

Start with Boeing’s Dreamliner itself. It’s not “made in the U.S.A..” It’s assembled in the United States. But most of it parts come from overseas. Those foreign parts total almost a third of the cost of the entire plane.  

For example:

The Italian firm Alenia Aeronautica makes the center fuselage and horizontal stabilizers.

The French firm Messier-Dowty makes the aircraft’s landing gears and doors.

The German firm Diehl Luftfahrt Elektronik supplies the main cabin lighting.

The Swedish firm Saab Aerostructures makes the cargo access doors.

The Japanese company Jamco makes parts for the lavatories, flight deck interiors and galleys.

The French firm Thales makes its electrical power conversion system.

Thales selected GS Yuasa, a Japanese firm, in 2005 to supply it with the system’s lithium-ion batteries.

The British company Rolls Royce makes many of the engines.

A Canadian firm makes the moveable trailing edge of the wings.

Notably, these companies don’t pay their workers low wages. In fact, when you add in the value of health and pension benefits – either directly from these companies to their workers, or in the form of public benefits to which the companies contribute – most of these foreign workers get a better deal than do Boeing’s workers. (The average wage for Boeing production and maintenance workers in South Carolina is $20.59 per hour, or $42,827 a year.) They also get more paid vacation days.

These nations also provide most young people with excellent educations and technical training. They continuously upgrade the skills of their workers. And they offer universally-available health care.

To pay for all this, these countries also impose higher tax rates on their corporations and wealthy individuals than does the United States. And their health, safety, environmental, and labor regulations are stricter.

Not incidentally, they have stronger unions.

So why is so much of Boeing’s Dreamliner coming from these high-wage, high-tax, high-cost places?

Because the parts made by workers in these countries are better, last longer, and are more reliable than parts made anywhere else.

There’s a lesson here.

The way to make the American workforce more competitive isn’t to put economic walls around America. It’s to invest more and invest better in the education and skills of Americans, in on-the-job training, in a healthcare system that reaches more of us and makes sure we stay healthy. And to give workers a say in their companies through strong unions.

In other words, we get a first-class workforce by investing in the productive capacities of Americans  – and rewarding them with high wages.

It’s the exact opposite of what Trump is proposing.

By the way, the first delivery of the Dreamliner is scheduled to take place next year – to Singapore Airlines. Current orders for it include Air France, British Airways, and Mexico’s flag carrier, Aeromexico.

Boeing is also looking to China to buy as much as $1 trillion worth of its commercial airplanes over the next two decades, including wide-body jets like the 787 Dreamliner. China already accounts for a fifth of Boeing’s sales.

But if Trump succeeds in putting an economic wall around America, these other nation’s airlines may have second thoughts about buying from Boeing. They might choose an airplane from a country more open to their own exports – say, Europe’s Airbus.

Trump’s “America First” economics is pure demagoguery. Xenophobic grandstanding doesn’t boost the competitiveness of American workers. Nor does it boost American-based companies.

At most, it boosts Trump.

The Republican Tax Sham

Watch your wallets. Republicans are pushing a new corporate tax plan that will end up costing most of you a bundle. Here’s what you should know about the so-called “border adjustment tax." 

The U.S. imports about $2.7 trillion worth of goods a year. Many imports are cheap because labor costs are much lower in places like Southeast Asia.

Our current tax code taxes corporations on their profits. So, for example, when Wal-Mart buys t-shirts from Vietnam for $10 and sells them for $13, Wal-Mart is only taxed on that $3 of profit.

But under the new Republican tax plan, Wal-Mart would be taxed on the full price of imported items, so in this case the full $13 sale price of that t-shirt. As a result of this tax, Wall Street analysts expect retail prices in the U.S. to rise as much as 15 percent.

The plan would also cut taxes on companies that export from the United States. This is intended to encourage companies to locate production here in the United States. 

But it wouldn’t reverse the tide of automation that’s rapidly eliminating jobs even  from American factories.

The worst thing about it the plan is it’s a hidden upward redistribution.  

Its burden will fall mainly on the poor and middle class because they already spend almost all of their incomes, so they’ll feel the greatest pain from higher retail prices.

The benefits will go to companies that export and their shareholders, who will benefit from the tax cuts in the form of higher profits – and higher share prices.  Shareholders, who are mostly upper-income people, don’t need this windfall.

Republicans claim that the U.S. dollar would rise in response to higher taxes on imports, effectively wiping out the tax burden. But as a practical matter, no one knows if this will happen.

Bottom line: The tax plan is dressed up as a way to make America more competitive. But underneath it’s just a typical Republican plan that redistributes from the poor and middle class to corporations and the wealthy.

On Sunday, White House Senior Advisor Stephen Miller claimed 14 percent of non-citizens are registered to vote. “We know for a fact, you have massive numbers of non-citizens registered to vote in this country,” he said, appearing on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos. “The White House has provided enormous evidence with respect to voter fraud.”

Miller is repeating an assertion Trump continues to make. 

It is absolutely false. 

What do we do when we have a president and White House surrogates, along with enablers in the right-wing media, who continuously lie about something as fundamental to our democracy as whether we’ve got massive voter fraud?

The answer is we find the truth. We spread the truth. We continue to speak the truth. And we use every chance we have – in opeds, in letters to editors, in local media, on national media – to state the truth.

And we demand that big lies like this be corrected.

A new report on voter fraud from the Brennan Center confirms that multiple nationwide studies have uncovered only a handful of incidents of non-citizens voting. 

Based on state prosecution records, votes by non-citizens account for between 0.0003 percent and 0.001 percent of all votes cast.

Election officials agree that non-citizen voting in our elections is not a problem. The National Association of Secretaries of State, whose Republican-majority membership includes the chief elections officers of 40 states, said they “are not aware of any evidence that supports the voter fraud claims made by President Trump.”

Federal law and the laws of every state bar non-citizens from registering to vote or voting in elections. Experts believe that the severity of the penalties for violating these laws serve as a significant deterrent. Also, it is relatively easy for a non-citizen to get caught.

Trump’s false assertion of massive voting fraud is intended for one purpose: to legitimate more voter identification laws around the country.

Voter identification laws are already spreading rapidly. Before 2006, no state required photo identification to vote on Election Day. Now, 10 states have this requirement. All told, a total of 33 states — representing more than half the nation’s population — have some version of voter identification rules on the books.

The purpose of these laws is to further entrench Republican officials.

New research shows a significant drop in minority participation when and where these laws are implemented – which is what you would expect given that members of racial and ethnic minorities have less access to photo IDs.

The research also shows that because minority voters tend to be Democrats, strict voter ID laws tilt the primary electorate dramatically. The turnout gap between Republicans and Democrats in primary contests more than doubles from 4.3 points to 9.8 points.

The truth: There’s no voter fraud. State ID laws intended to stop voter fraud are really intended to stop Democrats from voting – and that’s been their effect.

One of the most important common goods in our society is the truth about our democracy. Trump is pulverizing that truth – laying the groundwork for more state restrictions on access to the ballot by American citizens. 

This is beyond shameful.

The American public deserves to know the answers to at least the first five of these questions, and will then make a judgment on the sixth:

1. Why didn’t Trump act sooner to fire Flynn? He knew about Flynn’s contact with the Russian ambassador at least since January, when then-acting attorney general Sally Yates notified the White House that Flynn had “put himself in a compromising position” with his phone call to the Russian ambassador.

2. What, if anything, did Trump authorize Michael Flynn to tell the Russians before the inauguration?

3. What other contacts did Flynn and other Trump aides have with Russia before the election? U.S. intelligence reports show that Flynn was in touch with Russian ambassador Kislyak during the 2016 campaign, and that communications between the two continued after Nov. 8. The Russian ambassador has even confirmed having contacts with Flynn before and after the election, though he declined to say what was discussed.

4. Did Flynn or other Trump aides know of or cooperate with Russia in interfering in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf?

5. If so, did Trump know about or encourage such cooperation?

These questions won’t go away. The FBI and the Senate Intelligence Community are investigating. Hopefully, investigative reporters are also on the case. Eventually, the truth will come out. As Richard Nixon learned, coverups in Washington just make things worse. 

Which leads inevitably to the last question:

6. If Trump knew or encouraged, will he be impeached?

Donald Trump sold himself to voters as a successful businessman who knew how to get things done, a no-nonsense manager who’d whip government into shape.

But he’s showing himself to be about the most inept, disorganized, sloppy, incompetent president in recent memory, whose White House is nearly dysfunctional.

He allowed Michael Flynn to hang on until the last minute. In any halfway competent administration Flynn would have been gone the moment it became clear he lied to the vice president about his contacts with Russia. 

Sean Spicer is a joke, literally. His vituperative, vindictive press conferences are already rich food for late-night comedy. In a White House that had any idea what it means to be an effective press secretary, Spicer would be out the door.

The Muslim travel ban was totally bungled – unclear, haphazard, badly thought out. Trump complains that “his people didn’t give him good advice,” but the people most directly responsible for it – Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller – have only gained more power in the White House.  

Meanwhile, Trump’s White House has sprung more leaks than any in memory. Aides are leaking news about other aides. They’re leaking examples of Trump’s incompetence and weirdness. They’re leaking the contents of telephone calls to other heads of state in which Trump was unprepared, didn’t know basic facts, and berated foreign leaders.

Chief of Staff Reince Priebus seems to have no idea what’s going on. A White House official complained to The Washington Post, “We have to get Reince to relax into the job and become more competent, because he’s seeing shadows where there are no shadows.” Trump’s buddy Chris Ruddy described Priebus as being “in way over his head.”

Infighting is wild. Rumors are swirling that Kellyanne Conway wants Priebu’s job, that Stephen Miller is eyeing Spicer’s job, that no one trusts anyone else.

The New York Times reports “chaotic and anxious days inside the White House’s National Security Council.” Council staff read Trump’s tweets, and struggle to make policy to fit them. Most are kept in the dark about what Trump tells foreign leaders in his phone calls.

Trump himself is remarkably sloppy with sensitive national security information. For example, on Saturday night he discussed North Korea’s latest missile launch on a mobile phone at his table in the middle of Mar-a-Lago’s private club’s dining area, within earshot of private club members. A guest at the club even posed with the military aide who carries “the football” (the briefcase containing instructions for authorizing a nuclear attack).

The U.S. intelligence community is so convinced that Trump and his administration have been compromised by Russia that they’re no longer giving the White House all of their most sensitive information, lest it end up in Putin’s hands.

A senior National Security Agency official says the National Security Agency is systematically holding back some of the “good stuff” from the White House, fearing Trump and his staff can’t keep secrets. The intelligence community is concerned that even the Situation Room – the room in the West Wing where the president and his top staffers get intelligence briefings – has been compromised by Russia.

The White House mess is Trump’s own fault. He’s supposed to be in charge,but it turns out he’s not a tough manager. He’s not even a good manager. He seems not to have any interest in managing at all.

Instead of whipping government into shape, he’s whipping it into a cauldron of dysfunction and intrigue. 

Just like his promises to “drain the Washington swamp” and limit the influence of big money, get Wall Street out of policy making, and turn government back to the people, Trump’s promise of an efficient government is another giant bait-and-switch.