Out of frustration, I asked Twitter this morning to serve as my open-source assignment editor:
Most of the responses have suggested that both are deserving topics, which is of course true but at first blush doesn't seem to help much. But it did set me to wondering: Is there some commonality between the topics, something that ties them together? And yes, as it turns out, there is, and it's pretty damn obvious.
In both cases, at their root, what we're talking about is power -- personal power, economic power, institutional power, systemic power, celebrity power -- and how it can be abused by those who wield it over other human beings. "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," as Lord Acton reminded us, and here we have two very different examples of that same phenomenon.
In both cases, you see power having its way, without regard to its impact. In both cases, you see the failure of those systems and moral codes and values that are supposed to mitigate that power differential, that are supposed to restrain the powerful against the less powerful, that are supposed to protect us from the worst in each other but too often do not.
In the case of the tax-cut bill, Republicans are describing it endlessly, relentlessly, as a "middle-class tax cut." After its passage Thursday, House Speaker Paul Ryan even celebrated it as some sort of triumph over the establishment, as if Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce and million-dollar donors were the downtrodden victims in our system who are finally enjoying justice.
As Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn admitted, “The most excited group out there are big CEOs about our tax plan.” As several GOP congressmen have acknowledged, they are passing the bill to placate their big donors even though most polling suggests it is highly unpopular. And as I point out in the tweet up above, middle-income and lower-income American households share a whopping $1 out of every $10 in tax relief in the bill, while the rest ends up in the hands of corporations and the wealthy.
Do the math. Of the $1.5 trillion in tax cuts, $1 trillion comes in the form of corporate tax cuts. Another $200 billion comes from the elimination of the estate tax, which affects only estates of $11 million or more for a couple. Just $300 billion -- one fifth of the total -- comes in the form of tax cuts for individuals, and roughly half of that relief accrues to the 6.2 percent of American households making $200,000 or more a year. What's left is one dollar out of ten.
Furthermore, the corporate tax cuts and the abolition of the estate tax are permanent, while the tax cuts for everybody else start to disappear almost as soon as they are implemented.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is power looking out for power. It is raw and is naked and as we are witnessing, it is very, very effective.
Now let's deal with the president's tweet from last night, responding to the sexual-harassment scandal involving Sen. Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota.
There's of course no excuse for what Franken did. It too was an assertion of male power over a woman less well-equipped to fight back. In the case of the now infamous photograph, Franken's victim was asleep and thus completely unaware of being publicly degraded. As Franken himself acknowledged later, "there's no excuse," and there is not.
But given Trump's own history, how can he even think of tweeting something like that? It is explainable only as the act of a man who believes that he has transcended accountability altogether, who is utterly confident that power has exempted him from the rules that apply to others, that he can touch but not be touched.
And from his point of view, why shouldn't Trump feel that way?
Before the election, he was revealed on tape bragging that "I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything... Grab them by the pussy.” He is exulting in the power that his fame and wealth give him, reveling in the abuse of that power.
Before the election, more than a dozen women then came forward, by name, to explain what it felt like when Trump translated those words, that power differential, into crude action.
There's the woman who sat next to Trump on an airplane and complained of being mauled; the journalist who said she was accosted while Trump's new wife Melania was in the next room; the four Miss Teen USA competitors who recalled Trump barging into their dressing rooms when they were naked or topless¹; the woman who said Trump -- a total stranger -- had reached up her dress and touched her genital area; the makeup artist who said Trump assaulted her in his daughter Ivanka's bedroom; the Miss USA contestant who said Trump kissed her and others on the mouth, against their will; the woman who said Trump grabbed her breast at a golf tournament; the real-estate agent who said he forcibly kissed her, without warning; the Miss Finland and Miss Washington who told similar tales.
Yet Trump was elected president of the United States anyway. Roy Moore, with his own long list of transgressions, may yet be elected to the U.S. Senate anyway. That too is power, raw and naked.
You can look at American history a lot of different ways, but from one basic perspective it is a 250-year-old effort to mitigate the dangers of power, to use government to reduce the size, scale and danger of power differentials and to ensure that government itself doesn't become a means by which those differentials are enforced.
On the matter of sexual harassment, we are witnessing an important, historic and certainly overdue moment in which norms and laws are changing on behalf of the less powerful who have always had to suffer in silence. Power differentials rooted in race are in flux as well, forcing difficult adjustments for many. But in government and the economy, I'm afraid, we are witnessing the opposite. We are watching as the justified frustrations and anger of the less powerful are being hijacked and transmuted by the powerful to serve their own purposes, to reinforce and make permanent the advantages that power provides.
As Lord Acton also reminds, “Liberty consists in the division of power. Absolutism, in concentration of power.”
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¹ As Trump told Howard Stern: “Before a show, I’ll go backstage and everyone’s getting dressed, and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it. You know, I’m inspecting because I want to make sure that everything is good.”
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