Not abusing prisoners also helps solve crimes, although Trump has never shown any understanding of how police do their jobs. It is citizens who help police solve crimes by coming forward with information and physical evidence that detectives then assemble, connecting dots to present a case to prosecutors. Without community trust and cooperation, criminals can and do get away with their deeds. Further, police who rough up suspects risk suspension, firing, and even indictment, while the taxpayers can be hit with lawsuits requiring costly litigation or settlements.
The logical implication of Trump’s remarks is that he would repeal the laws, procedural rules, and moral standards that protect the rights of everyone, including suspects. That is how it is done in Russia, whose autocratic leader Trump praises at every opportunity as a great leader. He has similarly praised the autocratic rulers of the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, three other nations whose leaders keep their people in line.
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Trump’s clear statements characterizing members of MS-13 and other criminal gangs as bloodthirsty savages unworthy of respect for their Constitutional rights fit perfectly with the Arizona address that left no doubt Trump hopes to create an America with two standards of justice, one for his supporters and one for everyone else. His first federal budget proposal supported this interpretation.
Trump wants the federal government to become a much more militaristic and paramilitary policing organization while making drastic cuts in the civilian workforce, a story no mainstream news organization covered until I broke the news at DCReport.org. The budget memo referred to increasing spending only on militarism and enforcing immigration laws as part of “broader efforts to streamline government by ensuring that the federal government spends precious taxpayer dollars only on worthwhile policies, and in the most efficient, effective manner.” Civilian agencies were instructed not even to ask for more money. Instead, they were ordered to identify programs for reduction or elimination so money could be shifted to the military and policing.
Trump never told those at the rally that he had tried to stop the Arpaio prosecution. He telephoned Attorney General Jeff Sessions to intercede, just as he had asked James Comey to drop the FBI investigation of retired General Michael Flynn, who was Trump’s first national security adviser. Sessions, like Comey, declined. Sessions even told Trump that his request would be improper, three people with knowledge of the call told The Washington Post.
While Sessions has never been a friend to minorities or criminal suspects, he knew that the Justice Department is supposed to be independent of the president for many reasons. Furthermore, stopping a criminal prosecution, calling off an FBI investigation, or initiating one for political or personal reasons could be an impeachable offense and, after removal from office, prosecutable as a felony.
Under long-standing protocols, White House staff generally cannot even talk directly to Justice Department lawyers about potential or pending cases, except in some matters of national security. In 2007, when George W. Bush was president, the Justice Department issued precise rules limiting contact on matters civil and criminal as well as pardons. Most inquiries must go through high-level Justice Department officials and the White House counsel. The guidelines state that the purpose is to ensure the “president’s ability to perform his constitutional obligation to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed’ while ensuring that there is public confidence that the laws of the United States are administered and enforced in an impartial manner.” The guidelines also require those seeking pardons to have served much of their sentence and to express remorse. Arpaio had yet to be sentenced. He might have gotten off with probation. Given Arpaio’s age—he was eighty-five—and the fact that he was out of office, it was unlikely he would have gotten the maximum of six months behind bars. But Trump didn’t wait to see what punishment would be imposed, because relief for Sheriff Joe was not the point of the pardon; sending signals was.
The Constitution does not require that presidents follow or even give a nod to the Justice Department guidelines. But presidents who have bent or ignored the guidelines have touched off firestorms of criticism, including from Jeff Sessions. As a Republican senator from Alabama with a long pedigree of hard-line law-and-order positions, Sessions expressed outrage in 2014 not over a pardon, but a new policy outlining who could ask for clemency to reduce a prison term.
President Obama had decided that nonviolent drug offenders could apply for clemency because he thought many such sentences were excessive, especially sentences for crack cocaine. Congress had enacted long mandatory sentences for amounts of the illegal drug that in powdered form would have seen offenders released in a jiffy. Crack was much more widely ingested by black Americans; whites preferred powder.
“An alarming abuse of the pardon power,” Sessions declared. “If this latest unilateral action becomes the norm, then what kind of Pandora’s box has the president opened? Can a president pardon all people convicted of financial fraud, or identity theft, or unlawful re-entry into the country, or any category of crime when Congress does not act as the executive wishes?”
Sessions also said that “to unilaterally determine that a sentence was unjustified simply because the president disagrees with the underlying criminal justice policy is a thumb in the eye of the law enforcement officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, court and prison personnel who put time and resources into these cases.”
Given the standard Sessions set for changing the rules on merely asking for mercy, the Arpaio pardon should have ignited the attorney general’s fury. He said nothing.
Wounding the Veterans
Visit the White House webpage titled “Making Our Military Strong Again” and you will read that “the Trump Administration will rebuild our military and do everything it can to make sure our veterans get the care they deserve.”
Then come these firm promises:
Let us never forget that our military is comprised of heroic people. We must also ensure that we have the best medical care, education and support for our military service members and their families—both when they serve, and when they return to civilian life.
We will get our veterans the care they need wherever and whenever they need it. There should be no more long drives. No more wait lists or scheduling backlogs. No more excessive red tape. Just the care and support our veterans have earned through sacrifice and service to our country. The Trump Administration will transform the Department of Veterans Affairs to meet the needs of 21st century service members and of our female veterans. Our reforms will begin with firing the corrupt and incompetent VA executives who let our veterans down, modernizing the bureaucracy, and empowering the doctors and nurses to ensure our veterans receive the best care available in a timely manner.
Under the Trump Administration, America will meet its commitments to our veterans.
That breathtaking commitment delighted millions of veterans and their relatives who voted for Trump. The webpage is consistent with the many specific and repeated promises the candidate made to veterans, especially about long wait times to get medical care at the 150 Veterans Administration hospitals and more than eight hundred VA clinics. The Department of Veterans Affairs, the fifth largest federal agency, is authorized by Congress to spend $180 billion during the 2017 budget year, a sum almost equal to the budget of Turkey, a country with 80 million people. But even that sum was not nearly enough to promptly and fully serve the nation’s more than 23 million military veterans.
More than 2.3 million veterans were receiving disability benefits in 2000. Then came 9/11. Less than a month later, troops invaded Afghanistan, followed in 2003 by the invasion of Iraq. By 2015 almost 4.2 million veterans received disability benefits, in large part because modern medicine saved many causalities from wounds that would have been fatal in wars past. In World War II for every airman, sailor, and soldier killed in combat, 2.3 wounded survived. This ratio grew to nearly nine survivors for each combat death in Afghanistan and Iraq.
These problems persisted even though the VA’s total budget, adjusted for inflation, nearly tripled between the 2000 and 2017 budgets. Congress not only failed to fully adjust spending to keep pace with the higher survival ratios from combat wounds, it also did not consider the soaring costs of technology-based medical care and the longer lives disabled veterans were likely to have provided they got proper medical care and monthly disability checks sufficient to make their lives passably pleasant. Among these were the costs of mental and emotional trauma, known as post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, a condition heightened by the nature of twenty-first-century conflicts with women and children suicide bombers, sudden attacks on American troops by ostensibly friendly local forces, and the lack of clear front lines and combat zones.
Candidate Trump repeatedly promised voters he would make sure veterans got all the help they had earned and without long delays to be seen by doctors even if that meant paying for private physicians instead of VA staff.
Trump had no military experience, though he sometimes told audiences about attending a New York military academy. His father sent him there the summer he turned thirteen because he was constantly getting into trouble. Fred Trump believed his son needed discipline, his son later said. When the Vietnam War loomed, some men of wealthy families who could have pulled strings to escape service volunteered, notably future Democratic Party presidential candidates Al Gore and John Kerry. Trump got deferments as a college student. When those ran out he got a medical deferment. His doctor said Trump was unfit for service because of a bone spur in one foot. During the presidential campaign, Trump said he could not recall which foot.
But Trump did not just avoid military service, he repeatedly denigrated those who went to war. During one of his many guest spots on the radio show of Howard Stern, the “shock jock” who specializes in crude commentary on women’s bodies, Trump compared not contracting a venereal disease from his sexual conquests to serving in combat. “If you have any guilt about not having gone to Vietnam, we have our own Vietnam. It’s called the dating game. Dating is like being in Vietnam. You’re the equivalent of a soldier going over to Vietnam.”
Four years later, in 1997, Stern again asked him about sexually transmitted diseases. This time Trump compared himself even more favorably to soldiers in combat. “It’s amazing, I can’t even believe it. I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world, it is a dangerous world out there. It’s like Vietnam, sort of. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave solider.”
In the early 1980s Trump agreed to be co-chair of the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission, but after the press announcement he attended only two meetings, one of them when he was accompanied by a reporter writing a magazine profile of him. Asked about this by writer Lois Romano in 1984, Trump said he would resign from the board. “They’re very small thinkers,” he said of the other trustees. “They’re stockbrokers that were in Vietnam and they don’t have ‘it.’ ”
An early sign that Trump’s lack of military experience, combined with his lack of interest in reading anything not about him, would limit his knowledge of veterans’ issues emerged when he made a campaign stop at the Retired American Warriors Political Action Committee in Herndon, Virginia. A congenial moderator asked about services for veterans, especially those who suffer with post-traumatic stress.
“When you talk about the mental health problems when people come back from war and combat, and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over, and you’re strong and you can handle it, but a lot of people can’t handle it,” Trump said. The implication of his remark—that those suffering from post-traumatic stress are weak—prompted many veterans’ group leaders and individuals to call Trump insensitive, ill-informed, or ignorant. But they did not abandon him.
What kept many veterans’ groups behind Trump were the promises he made moments after the ill-considered comment on the psychological effects of modern war, promises he repeated in the months that followed. Near the top of his White House to-do list, Trump said, would be mental health services for vets. “When you hear the 22 suicides a day that should never be. That should never be,” Trump said. “So, we’re going to be addressing that very strongly and the whole mental health issue is going to be a very important issue when I take over and the V.A. is going to be fixed in so many ways but that’s going to be one of the ways we’re going to help. And that’s in many respects going to be the number one thing we have to do.”
Two months earlier he had pledged to another veterans’ organization that he would personally solve problems veterans had with the VA.
“I will create a private White House hotline,” Trump announced. Then he shifted verbal gears to lighten the moment, saying, “This could keep me very busy at night, folks. This will take the place of Twitter.” That drew mild laughter.
Resuming his pitch, Trump promised that the White House hotline would be “answered by a real person 24 hours a day to make sure that no valid complaint about the VA ever falls through the cracks. I will instruct my staff that if a valid complaint is not acted upon” it then must be “brought directly to me—and I want to have it—will bring it directly to me, and I will pick up the phone personally and get it completed and get it taken care of.”
The promise of immediate and personal action turned out to be just another Trump con. More than six months after taking office, no hotline had been set up inside the White House or at any other government facility. The White House said it did not know when a hotline might be activated. The VA public affairs office said nothing. Worse, Trump’s budget proposed not more money to care for veterans, but cuts.
Trump’s administration did act on some VA promises. In June Trump signed into law the Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act, one of his very few legislative accomplishments. The law made it much easier for the man whose signature television line was “You’re fired” to discharge VA employees. The new law drew a mixed response, hailed because it made removal of corrupt as well as poor performers easy, but denounced by those who feared it would be used to slash VA staff in future Trump budget cuts. Some feared it was just the first step in removing the civil service rules that for more than a century had encouraged dedicated professionals to work for our government by insulating them from patronage politics.
While Trump promised that veterans would get all the care they had earned with their military service, his first budget showed otherwise. He proposed spending on mental health care and assistance for homeless veterans at the same level as Obama’s last budget, which means a slight cut due to inflation.
The biggest cut Trump proposed was ending a benefit for disabled veterans once they reach the minimum age for Social Security benefits. These veterans would see their income plunge from almost $35,000 annually to less than $13,000 if the Trump plan becomes law.
Many veterans rated less than 100 percent disabled cannot get anyone to hire them because their injuries from combat or accidents severely limit their capacity to work. Under our government’s Individual Unemployability program, veterans at least 60 percent disabled can get the same disability benefits as those rated 100 percent disabled. Being unable to work also means they cannot qualify for pensions or save from their earnings for retirement. The Trump budget calls for ending veterans’ unemployability benefits as soon as a veteran becomes eligible for Social Security, asserting that receiving both amounts to a double dip at the expense of taxpayers. The change would save $3.2 billion in the 2018 budget year and much more in future years. But annual income could fall by as much as $22,200 per veteran wi
th an average cut of more than $14,000, not exactly the song candidate Trump sang in his numerous appearances before veterans groups.
Congressman Mark Takano, a California Democrat, raised the issue of how much fear the budget cuts had put into the hearts of disabled veterans when Trump’s secretary for Veterans Affairs, David Shulkin, appeared before the House Veterans’ Affairs committee. “If you end the payments to veterans like this, don’t you risk plunging them into poverty?” Takano asked at a May hearing.
In seeking to reduce federal spending, Shulkin said the Trump administration was “looking at where we can make the program more responsible.” It was a not well considered response given that, as Takano noted, the 225,000 veterans who would have their benefits cut in the first year could not work, could not save for retirement, and had put their lives in the hands of our government. Takano also got Shulkin to acknowledge that seven thousand of these veterans were age eighty or older.
Shulkin’s response aroused the ire of veterans’ organizations. Joe Chenelly, executive director of AMVETS, said the prospect of these cuts terrified many vets and would spread misery if enacted because many would become homeless and some would surely commit suicide. “These scared veterans need real assurance now that this proposal is a non-starter. We cannot subject these veterans to a long, stressful summer.” The Trump administration later backed off this plan, but not its proposed cuts to veterans.
The Trump budget also called for reducing housing vouchers for veterans. The number of homeless veterans had been shrinking since 2010, a trend likely to be reversed if fewer subsidies would be available for housing veterans who are unemployed or can find work only episodically, as Trump’s budget proposed. And the budget called for eliminating the $3.5 million for an interagency council that coordinates efforts by nineteen federal agencies to reduce duplication of government services while working to reduce homelessness among veterans.
It's Even Worse Than You Think Page 23