Trump's war on facts a losing gambit -- Jan. 26, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER

I am 5’10,” speak French like a native and play the piano flawlessly. Oh, and Donald Trump just released his tax returns and resigned as president.

Not one of those facts is real. They’re falsehoods, fibs, fantasy. OK, whoppers.   

They would be lies -- and I a liar -- if I intended to deceive you. I don’t. Like most Americans, I respect facts, evidence and truth, which is more than you can say for President Trump.

Trump’s revolution showed its disdain for science by scrubbing the White House web site of all mention of climate change and gagging the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Agriculture.

A president has every right to change policy, but stopping the free flow of facts is wrong. It goes against the grain of our history.

Long before the American Revolution, John Adams, later our second president, said in 1770: “Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

Americans have prized truth in our leaders, sometimes honored in the breach more than in the observance, since George Washington. The myth of the boy, his hatchet and the cherry tree -- “I cannot tell a lie” – gave generations a role model.  

In the 20^th Century, Jimmy Carter won the White House promising: “I’ll never tell a lie.” People rolled their eyes, but Carter’s earnestness was refreshing after the lyin’ Nixon years and Watergate scandal.

Politicians and presidents do lie, of course, but we’ve never had a president like Trump, who wields fake facts as emotional prods to rile up his followers.  

Trump tried for years to prove the lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and said Hillary Clinton and her 2008 campaign started the rumor – claims that were repeatedly debunked and yet built him a following.

He backed off last September when the lie began to impede his path to the White House, still insisting that Clinton started it.

Trump won despite his loose affiliation with truth during the campaign. As president, he has turned to alternative facts.

“Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts” that the crowds at Trump’s inauguration were the biggest ever, despite photo evidence to the contrary, Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump aide, said last Sunday on “Meet the Press.”

Chuck Todd, the show’s moderator, replied, “Alternative facts aren’t facts. They are falsehoods.”

The phrase, alternative facts, was a chilling reminder of George Orwell’s “1984,” a novel published in 1932 that envisions a dystopian future where the Ministry of Truth subverts facts and history. This week, “1984” jumped to No. 1 on Amazon.

Sales of  “1984” have soared 9,500 percent since the Trump inauguration, and publisher Penguin is rushing out a reprint of 75,000 copies.

The Amazon Top 20 included “It Can’t Happen Here” by Sinclair Lewis, about the election of an authoritarian president wonderfully named Buzz Windrip, and “Brave New World,” by Aldous Huxley, also a dark view of the future where an authoritarian regime quashes thought.  

If Trump’s alternative facts were as benign as his wish for longer fingers or thicker hair, we could ignore them. But he’s no longer a billionaire private citizen with kooky ideas or a candidate crying “rigged election” in case he loses.  

Unable to let go of his baseless claim that he would have won the popular vote were it not for up to five million people illegally voting for Hillary Clinton, the president tweeted his call for a “major investigation” into voter fraud.

No matter that state election officials insist there’s zero evidence of widespread fraud. Voter fraud is one of Trump’s unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.

It’s “a longstanding belief he’s maintained,” Sean Spicer, White House Press secretary, told reporters.

It’s encouraging that some powerful Republicans in Congress want no part in investigating this particular longstanding belief of Trump’s.  

“I don’t see any evidence,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told reporters. “But the president has 100,000 people at the Department of Justice, and if he wants to have an investigation, have at it.”

Facts are stubborn things, and people want a president whose facts they can trust. Playing fast and loose with truth is no way to govern.

As someone who hates to lose, Trump should realize this gambit won’t win.

©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Backstory on SOTU: TJ wouldn't approve -- Jan. 15, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

On Tuesday night, President Barack Obama will ride in his limo to the Capitol where, bathed in TV light, he will deliver his State of the Union Address to a joint session of Congress. 

Ho hum, you may say with 21^st century ennui. Big deal. We don’t think twice about presidents appearing before Congress.

But nobody was blasé in April 1913 when President Woodrow Wilson addressed Congress in person. It was shocking.

Presidents in those days didn’t deliver speeches to Congress. They followed the model of Thomas Jefferson and sent carefully written reports.  

The Constitution requires that a president “shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” It’s silent on how the information should be delivered.

Presidents George Washington and John Adams gave annual messages to Congress in person, but Jefferson ceased the practice. He found the pomp and ceremony too reminiscent of the English monarch’s “speech from the throne” to Parliament. The first two presidents had appeared with quite the entourage -- their entire Cabinets and all their secretaries.

Jefferson apparently wasn’t a polished public speaker and the Capitol wasn’t yet finished, so he was happy to give the speech a pass. So were his successors.   

Wilson, the Virginia-born former president of Princeton University and former governor of New Jersey, was a gifted orator at ease before crowds. He said when he broke with the tradition: 

“I think that (a personal appearance) is the only dignified way for the president to address Congress at the opening of a session, instead of sending the address to be read perfunctorily in the clerk’s familiar tone of voice. It is a precedent which, it is true, has been discontinued a long time, but which is a very respectable precedent.”

Wilson gave a brief speech and made the trip simply, driving to the Capitol with one Secret Service man. His male secretary followed in his own car, The New York Times reported. Democrat Wilson was fortunate to have Democrats in control of both houses of Congress.

After appearing in person before Congress a few weeks after his inauguration, Wilson went back to Congress in June and August of 1913. He started weekly press conferences. That December, he gave his first annual message to Congress – what we now call the State of the Union Address.  

Subsequent presidents went back and forth between written and oral State of the Union messages and some delivered both. Since Reagan, presidents have delivered speeches. The first official televised response by members of the opposing party came in 1966. In 2010, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell gave the official Republican response.

   

This will be Obama’s sixth State of the Union Address, and he’s a lame duck. His legislative wish list will be dismissed as mostly fantasy – if people watch at all.

Viewership of Obama’s State of the Union speech last year dropped to its lowest level since his first address. In 2009, about 52.4 million people tuned in to see Obama. Last year, just 33.3 million watched. That was also the lowest viewership for the State of the Union since Nielsen began keeping track in 1993. That year, Bill Clinton’s first, 66.9 million people watched.

Presidents often hit the road to sell their proposals after the State of the Union address. Obama has tried to build interest in his speech by previewing his proposals. He quipped that with only two years left in his term, he couldn’t wait for the speech to roll out his ideas.

Traveling around the country, he announced an array of proposals aimed at improving the lives of middle-class Americans. These include making community colleges free, stepping up cybersecurity measures, expanding broadband service, protecting the environment and allowing workers paid family and sick leave.

The catch is that many of Obama’s proposals require the approval of Congress. That will be no mean feat -- even after the president stands before a joint session and makes his pitch in person.  

© 2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Thankfully, we finally agree on Thanksgiving -- Nov. 20, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Thanksgiving, now deeply entrenched in modern American life, got off to a shaky start.

Yes, there were prayers of thanksgiving in Virginia and harvest feasting in Massachusetts in the 17^th century. But the first Congress squabbled over even asking the president to issue a thanksgiving proclamation.

In September 1789, a representative from New Jersey proposed that a committee from the House and Senate visit President George Washington and ask him to recommend to the people a day giving thanks for the many favors of Almighty God, especially the “opportunity peaceably to establish a Constitution of government for their safety and happiness.”

Two representatives from South Carolina objected -- one to the “mimicking of European customs, where they made a mere mockery of thanksgivings” and the other to interfering in matters beyond the proper scope of Congress, according to an account in The Papers of George Washington at the University of Virginia.

“Why should the president direct the people to do what, perhaps, they have no mind to do?” asked Thomas Tudor Tucker of South Carolina. “They may not be inclined to return thanks for a Constitution until they have experienced that it promotes their safety and happiness.”

Besides, said Tucker, Congress had no business getting involved in religion, and, he added, “If a day of thanksgiving must take place, let it be done by the authority of the several states.”

Despite the opposition, the resolution passed, and a committee did visit Washington, who issued a proclamation naming Thursday, Nov. 26, 1789, a day to unite in “sincere and humble thanks.”

Citizens and churches took to the first Thanksgiving, but the observance wasn’t set in November. Washington later proclaimed Feb. 19, 1795, a “day of public thanksgiving and prayer.” 

The second president, John Adams, issued proclamations for May 9, 1798, and April 25, 1799, but they weren’t officially for thanksgiving. We’d never recognize our feast-football-shop extravaganza in Adams’ day of “solemn humiliation, fasting and prayer.”

But when Thomas Jefferson became president, the proclamations of prayer or thanksgiving ceased. For eight years, he refused to issue any on the ground that it would have infringed on the separation of church and state.

During the War of 1812, Congress asked President James Madison to declare a day of “public humiliation and fasting and prayer to Almighty God for the safety and welfare of these States,” and he chose Jan. 12, 1815. A few months later, Madison named the second Thursday in April 1815 as a day of thanksgiving for the blessing of peace.

After that, no president until Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving.

Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States called for a day of fasting and humiliation in 1861 “in view of impending conflict,” and Lincoln proclaimed three days of thanksgiving for battle victories in 1862 and 1863.

For the national Thanksgiving holiday, we can thank Sarah Josepha Hale, an author and editor of Godey’s Lady Book magazine who campaigned tirelessly. By the 1850s, she had successfully lobbied more than 30 states and territories to put Thanksgiving on their calendars. Her goal, though, was a national holiday, which she believed would unify the country.

With the nation torn apart by Civil War, Hale wrote Lincoln on Sept. 28, 1863, asking him to use his executive authority to give Thanksgiving national recognition “to become permanently an American custom and institution.”

Days later, on Oct. 3, Lincoln signed a proclamation, actually written by Secretary of State William Seward, that the last Thursday of November would be “a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.”

Thanksgiving became our holiday on the last Thursday of November, not by law but by tradition.  

But in 1939, when the last Thursday fell on Nov. 30, with just 24 days before Christmas, retailers begged Franklin D. Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving up a week to lengthen the Christmas shopping season.

FDR proclaimed Thanksgiving to be on Nov. 23. His edict applied only to the District of Columbia and federal workers, but angry letters poured into the White House.

Sixteen states refused to accept the change. Two Thanksgivings were celebrated until 1941, when Congress stepped in.

A representative from Michigan declared that only Congress could change the date, “not the fancy or whim of any president.”

Congress set the federal holiday as the fourth Thursday in November. It may be one of the few things for which we all can be thankful.

©2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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