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Donald Trump

The Cognitive State of the President

January 7, 2018
by Peter Feinman
It's a Good Life (1961) One of multiple Twilight Zone (and Star Trek) episodes about the Trump presidency

The June 2016 issue of The Atlantic contains two articles relevant to the present discussion about the lack of cognitive abilities of the current President of the United States. The two articles are:

“How Kids Really Succeed,” by Paul Tough
“The Mind of Donald Trump,” by Dan P. McAdams.

The two articles in the same hard copy magazine were not written as part of a single assignment. It is only by chance that the initially separate articles are juxtaposed.

This post will consist of excerpts from the two articles plus some comments of my own. The excerpted portions will not be highlighted in any way. The traditional academic apparatus of endnotes, footnotes, quotation marks, indentation, single spacing will not be adhered to. Instead it will be up to you Dear Reader to determine the origin of the material. While the combined text may not make for the smoothest of blogs, it should suffice to make its case.

NONCOGNITIVE SKILLS

Researchers concerned with academic-achievement gaps have begun to study with increasing interest and enthusiasm, a set of personal qualities― often referred to as noncognitive skills, or character strengths. These noncognitive skills tend not be measured in school performance but they often are the defining characteristics of an individual.

As brainy social animals, human beings evolved to be consummate actors whose survival and ability to reproduce depend on the quality of our performances. As Michael D’Antonio writes in his recent biography of Trump, Never Enough, Tom Griffin’s, owner of the Menie Estate near Aberdeen, most vivid recollection of the evening’s negotiations in 2006 pertains to the theatrics. It was as if the golden-haired guest sitting across the table were an actor playing a part on the London stage. “It was Donald Trump playing Donald Trump,” observed Griffin. The same feeling perplexed Mark Singer in the late 1990s when he was working on a profile of Trump for The New Yorker. Singer wondered what went through his mind when he was not playing the public role of Donald Trump. More than even Ronald Reagan, Trump seems supremely cognizant of the fact that he is always acting.

How does a person come to be an actor who is always performing? Where the stage name becomes the permanent name because the person is always on stage? A large and rapidly growing body of research shows that people’s temperament, their characteristic motivations and goals, and their internal conceptions of themselves are powerful predictors of what they will feel, think and do in the future.  Narrowing the focus to the realm of politics, psychologists have recently demonstrated how fundamental features of human personality—such as extroversion and narcissism—shaped the distinctive leadership styles of past U.S. presidents. The question before We the People with this president is “Is there any there there?” Is he an act with no substance? Or how did he get to be the person that he his?

The most important force shaping the development of these noncognitive skills turns out to be a surprising one: stress. Over the past decade neuroscientists have demonstrated with increasing clarity how severe and chronic stress in childhood―what doctors sometimes call toxic stress―leads to physiological and neurological adaptations in children that affect the way their minds and bodies develop and, significantly, the way they function in school.

Fred Trump raised his sons to be tough competitors because if you were not vigilant and fierce, you would never survive. Trump writes, “I wanted to be the toughest kid in the neighborhood.”  Children rely on responses from their parents to help them make sense of the world. More than any other experiences in infancy, these rudimentary interactions called “serve and return” between the parents and the child trigger the development and strengthening of connections among the regions of the brain that control emotion, cognition, language, and memory.

Trumps’ own narrative tells this story. The first chapter as he tells it today, expresses nothing like Bush’s gentle nostalgia or Obama’s curiosity. Instead it is saturated with a sense of danger and a need for toughness. The world cannot be trusted, it is one of toxic stress. Warrior narratives have traditionally been about and for young men. Now in the eighth decade of his life, Trump is still fighting his demons.

Stress can disrupt development of what are known as executive functions. In childhood, and especially in early childhood, this intricate stress-response network is highly sensitive to environmental cues. A highly sensitive stress-response system constant on the lookout for threat can produce patterns of behavior that are self-defeating in school. Toxic stress impedes mature development.

Narcissism stems from a deficiency in early-life mirroring. The parents fail to lovingly reflect back the young child’s own budding grandiosity, leaving the child in desperate need of affirmation from others. Ever since grade school, Trump has wanted to be No. 1.  His need to excel may have crowded out by making it impossible for him to show the kind of weakness and vulnerability that true intimacy typically requires. Not only is he incapable of sympathy and empathy, he considers such emotions the signs of a loser.

TEACHING NONCOGNITIVE SKILLS TO TOXIC-STRESSED STUDENTS

An influential study on the long-term effect of a stressful early home life identified 10 categories of childhood trauma. An elevated number has a negative effect on the development of a child’s executive functions and on her ability to learn effectively in school.

When teachers and administrators are confronted with students who find it hard to concentrate, manage their emotions, or deal calmly with provocation, they see them as kids with behavioral problems who need, more than anything, to be disciplined. Talking back and acting up in class are, at least in part, symptoms of a child’s inability to control impulses, de-escalate confrontations, and manage anger and other strong feelings. By his own account, Trump once punched his second-grade music teacher, giving him a black eye.

Trump said about his intimidating high school baseball coach, “Like so many strong guys, Dobias has a tendency to go for the jugular if he smelled weakness. On the other hand, if he senses strength but you didn’t try to undermine him, he treated you like a man.” Trump has never forgotten the lesson he learned from his father and from his teachers at the military academy: The world is a dangerous place. You have to be ready to fight.  As he said in an interview in 1981, “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.” There is no synergy. There is no “come let us reason together. There is no win-win. Every day is like another episode on a TV series Survivor where ultimately there can only be one winner.

People, especially those who have experienced significant adversity, are often guided by emotional and psychological and hormonal forces that are far from rational. There are limits to the effectiveness of rewards and punishments in k-12 education for young people whose neurological and psychological development has been shaped by intense stress. Straightforward systems are often especially ineffective.

The situation for such students is not hopeless. Spending a few hours each week in close proximity to a certain kind of teacher can change something about student’s behavior. The environment those teachers created in the classroom, and the messages that environment conveyed, motivated students to start making better decisions. In every school, it seemed, there were certain teachers who were especially good at developing cognitive skills in their students and other teachers who excelled at developing noncognitive skills. But the teachers in the second cohort were not being rewarded for their success with the students.

Trump apparently never had such teachers skilled in the ways of developing noncognitive skills. Or if he did, he was sufficiently set in his ways that nothing could change him. Today he is the same immature undisciplined child he was at age 13 when his father placed him in military school in the vain hope that he would become disciplined. General John Kelly is not his teacher and he readily acknowledges that he cannot change Trump.

THE DONALD

Across his lifetime, Donald Trump has exhibited a trait profile that you would not expect of a U.S. president: sky-high extroversion combined with off-the-chart low agreeableness. According to Barbara Res, who in the early 1980s served as vice president in charge of construction of Trump Tower in Manhattan, the emotional core around which Donald Trump’s personality constellates is anger. “He’s not faking it,” she said. Anger may be the operative emotion behind Trump’s high extroversion as a well as his low agreeableness. Anger can fuel malice, but it can also motivate social dominance, stoking a desire to win the adoration of others. Anger permeates his political rhetoric.

The broad social reputation Trump has garnered as a remarkably disagreeable person is based upon a lifetime of widely observed interactions. People low in agreeableness are described as callous, rude, arrogant, and lacking in empathy. The real psychological wild card is Trump’s agreeableness—or lack thereof. There has probably never been a U.S. president as consistently and overtly disagreeable on the public stage as Donald Trump. His public stage is always the professional wrestling arena, he is always on stage, and he is always playing the Donald.

People are mostly motivated not by the material consequences of our actions but by the inherent enjoyment and meaning that those actions bring us, a phenomenon called intrinsic motivation. Most people but not all people. For Trump, “It’s the hunt that I believe I love.” He is always spoiling for a fight. Remember that one of the signal results of toxic-stress exposure is a hyperactive fight-or-flight mechanism. The Republican candidates for president in 2016 never confronted Trump on his terms and he triumphed in the professional wrestling arena on which the nomination process was staged. The Democratic candidate for president in 2016 never confronted Trump on his terms and he triumphed in the professional wrestling arena on which the debates were staged. The former party of Lincoln rolled over like “a little girl” when he fired Mueller, never to stand up to him the way even high-school student Trump stood up to his baseball coach.

So who really is Donald Trump? What is behind the actor’s mask? I can discern little more than narcissistic motivations and a complementary personal narrative about winning at any cost. It is always Donald Trump playing Donald Trump, fighting to win, but never knowing why with the Republican Party, the United States, and the world paying the price.

My Birthday and the Day I Was Born Are the Same Day: Previewing the 2020 Election (Part 1)

May 29, 2017
by Peter Feinman
Lincoln Memorial Courtesy GalleryHip

Once upon a time more years ago than I care to count, my sister had an epiphany. Suddenly discrete data packets in her brain coalesced into a vision of breathless clarity and intense emotion. She was effused with the joy and happiness that only one who has seen the truth possesses. Overcome with the intensity of the experience she stood up and proudly exclaimed:

I JUST REALIZED THAT MY BIRTHDAY AND THE DAY I WAS BORN ARE THE SAME DAY!

For all she knew, she was the one and only person on the planet who had attained such knowledge.

How old do you think she was when she had this moment of understanding?

I was reminded of this bit of family lore when our immature child President announced to the world that in the eighth decade of his life, he had suddenly learned that Abraham Lincoln had been a Republican…and that not many people knew that. He apparently was quite proud of himself for now being the possessor of such obscure but important knowledge.

His moment of insight suggests that prior to this learning experience he had thought, along with most others, that Lincoln had been a Democratic President. Instead of simply making fun of him for being a blithering idiot, one should inquire as to how he came to think that Lincoln has been a Democrat.

Certainly it was not something he had learned in school.

Certainly it was not something he had read in a book.

Certainly it was not something he had learned from Fox where Lincoln never is mentioned.

So how then did he come to think of Lincoln as being a Democrat?

He may have presumed that since the former party of Lincoln now is a Confederate party of malice, that Lincoln therefore must have belong to the opposition party.

He may have presumed that since Steven Spielberg had produced a movie about Lincoln that therefore anyone who was a hero to La La Land liberals must have been Democratic.

He may have presumed that since New York State Governor Mario Cuomo had been a big admirer of Lincoln that therefore Lincoln must have been a Democrat as well.

He even may have been vaguely aware of Martin Luther King standing at the Lincoln Memorial at his “I have a dream” speech and since all Middle-Passage blacks are Democrats, therefore Lincoln must have been one too.

In short, we will never know for sure how it came to be that he thought Lincoln was a Democrat only to just recently discover that he was in error.

This eureka moment of understanding raises two critical issues. First, it calls into question his vaunted skill on not needing to be prepped, of not needing to read, of not needing to know anything in advance because he is so smart he can quickly size up the moment, understand the players, and determine the correct course of action. By now we are all in awe of his perceptive ability to make sense of health care, Korean-Chinese history, and taxes and to realize how easy the job of being President of the United States of America is for him even though he had no relevant experience and little knowledge going into the job. After but 100 plus days in office, the job is old hat to him, even boring since it is so easy. Unlike with his predecessor, there is no drama to his administration where everything runs like clockwork in a well-oiled smoothly humming machine.

Secondly, his Lincoln-as-Republican realization calls to mind what else he didn’t know about Lincoln besides his political party. For example, Lincoln concluded his second inaugural address with the famous words:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Is malice towards none a characteristic of our current Republican president?

Is charity for all a characteristic of our current Republican president?

Is binding up the nation’s wounds characteristic of our Republican president?

Does Lincoln having been a Republican have any meaning to people who claim to be Republicans today?

In Lincoln’s annual message to Congress, he referred to America as “the last best hope of earth.” Such thoughts continued the tradition begun by John Winthrop even before there was a United States. They were proclaimed most recently and prominently by Republican President Ronald Reagan who declared our country to be a shining city on a hill that the eyes of the world are upon. The America of Winthrop to Reagan and even beyond had a special role in human history. Even the Politically Correct acknowledge America’s special role in human history. True it is as the Great Satan but that still is a pretty impressive global role in human history.

Where is the vision today? In a world where everything is transactional, where everything is about the deal, where everything is about making money, there is no vision to inspire the world in a journey to a better tomorrow. So he now knows that Lincoln was Republican, so what?

Does Lincoln having been a Republican have any meaning to people who claim to be Republicans today?

Are there any ramifications to America’s abandonment of its role as a city on hill that the eyes of the world are upon? Certainly Turkey is happy about it. So is the Philippines. And Venezuela would be too if its autocrat prevails in the battle against democracy there.

Former Deputy Director of the CIA David Cohen warned of the danger to America of a purely commercial policy. He drew on his own experiences working with undercover agents from other countries. They were people who put their lives on the line for America precisely because it stood for everything our immature child president rejects. The values of the city on a hill that the eyes of the world are upon offered an alternative to the life they knew in their own country. They dreamed of living the American dream.

Cohen writes: “that image of the United States as the ‘last best hope of earth,” proclaimed by our leaders for decades, is an enormously effective recruiting too…” He goes on to tout the value of “the American idea” in promoting our interests. As he put it: “Tarnishing the idea that America stands for something uniquely good makes it harder for the C.I.A. to recruit spies.” Cohen concludes his op-ed piece with a ringing endorsement of America’s role in human history in starkly immediate terms for the safety of the country: “relinquishing America’s place as the shining city on the hill will do real and profound harm to our national security.” Our immature child president genuinely lacks the mental necessities to understand this reasoning. What about the former party of Lincoln?

Speaking again of Lincoln, let me conclude with one other area where his vision and that of the party that he belonged to differ – immigration.

In a debate with Stephen Douglas on July 10, 1858, in Chicago, the future President redefined how one was to define an American in a way those who are ignorant of Lincoln have not yet learned. Suppose one wasn’t a Son or a Daughter of the American Revolution? Could one still fully celebrate July 4? Listen to Lincoln’s answer:

In every way we are better men in the age, and race, and country in which we live for these celebrations. But after we have done all this we have not yet reached the whole. There is something else connected with it. We have besides these men-descended by blood from our ancestors-among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe-German, Irish, French and Scandinavian-men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, (loud and long continued applause) and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.

For Lincoln, one did not need to be a blood-descendant of the American Revolution to be one with the spirit of the event. Through adherence to the principles of the Declaration of Independence every American stood as one with those who had fought and died for America’s birth. The new Republican Party that Lincoln had joined was the immigrant party (except maybe not so clearly the party of the Irish), the party whose political interests were served by reaching out newly arrived and would-be Americans. By disavowing immigrant restrictions it succeeded in holding on to a fair share of the foreign-born vote, especially among younger Protestant voters. These immigrants from Scandinavia, France and Cornwall, among other places, supported Lincoln, Union and America.

Learning that Lincoln was a Republican should be the first step and not the only step for the president of the former party of Lincoln. If he is having trouble learning what it means to be an American, perhaps there are some Russians who can help him.

Amanda Anisimova
Scott McIntyre for the NYT

Konstanin Anismov, Russian immigrant and father of Maria Anisimova who graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and of Amanda Anisimova who will represent the United States as the youngest player in the French Open since 2005, on his immigration to America:

We really like Spain, but then we recognized when we visited America that everyone who comes here is going to feel like home. In Europe, you always feel like a foreigner because it is a completely different culture. America is a united country where people come from all over the world, and after a couple of years, they feel this is home. (“Only 15, but Ready for Her Grand Slam Debut” NYT 5/27/17).

If only the former party of Lincoln or the party of identity politics believed that. Is there no Lincoln in American politics today?

 

2020 Presidential Election: The Battle Is Engaged

January 27, 2017
by Peter Feinman
Electoral Map from 270towin.com

The 2016 presidential election was distinctively different from all previous ones. It continues to reverberate throughout the land. It was the subject of two posts here. First on the historical role of New York State governors in presidential elections from Martin Van Buren who became president to the Cuomos who have not so far. The previous New Yorker presidential election in 1944 featured two people, Roosevelt and Dewey, with state governor backgrounds. The most recent election offered two people with no political executive experience. The second post focused on the 22nd amendment. Without it the husband incumbent would have kept running for additional terms beyond the two-term limit and the wife never would have been considered as a candidate…except in the way dictators for life might seek to circumvent the rules by relinquishing their position in favor of their wife.

Since the election, the new and unique haven’t ceased. This transition period is the first time when a president-elect began conducting himself as if he already was the president. While he had no legal power, the electoral-college winner acted as if he was the president. His tweets and pronouncements may have been devoid of statutory power at the time, but they previewed what was going to happen once he took the oath of office. It was as if we had two presidents simultaneously, not a president and a co-president of vote for one you get two, but more like Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis having overlapping jurisdictions.

A second change during the transition period was the identification of an opposition candidate for the next election in 2020. Andy Cuomo, the New York State Governor, has all but officially announced his intention to run in 2020 even before his own re-re-election campaign for 2018. He will not be a Hamlet-of-the-Hudson” as his father was: “To be a candidate or not to be a candidate that is question.” There is no doubt in his mind. He is positioning himself upfront as the leader around whom Democrats should rally. As a governor he has ability to actually do things that talk-talk Senators can only talk about. On the other hand, Senators more easily have a national platform than governors…but not necessarily as much as media celebrities! Will George Clooney run in real life as he did in reel life? In any event, the race has started. The battle is engaged.

A third change manifested itself the day after the inauguration. It was the day when the Nasty Women said they were as mad as hell and were not going to take it anymore. The Nasty Women with their pussy hats sought to negate the insult of Donald Trump by embracing it as their own label. This action reminds me of when a group of Protestants in England back in the 1720s developed a new way of worship and reading the Bible. They were mocked by fellow classmates at Oxford for their unusual “methods.” The targets of this derogatory slur then adopted the term for their own name and became Methodists. The Nasty Woman may join the Tea Party as new names in the political arena that render the staid party names obsolete or less meaningful. The battle is engaged.

A fourth development may be a repeat of something we have not experienced since 1956. That presidential election was a replay of the 1952 election with the same Republican and Democratic candidates. In both instances, Dwight D. Eisenhower handily defeated Adlai E. Stevenson in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. While it seems likely the Republican candidate will run again in 2020, will the Democratic candidate run again again? The answer is conditional. It depends on whether or not she is alive. It’s not rocket science. As to what she will do in the interim, that is another question. Will the Democratic Party hand her the nomination as it worked to do this time? Probably not. Since she is not a fighter except to claim that to which she is entitled, how will she handle her first political contest when she is not the heir apparent and/or presumptive favorite? Is she still entitled? Is it still her turn? This battle is not yet engaged while she remains on hiatus.

The election itself produced a number of surprising results with implications for 2020. According to our new president, Mitt Romney ran the worst presidential campaign ever. As a longtime student of American history who is well-versed in the previous elections, our new president is the most qualified person in the country to render such a judgement. After all Romney only received 47.2% of the popular vote while Donald Trump received 46.1%. Clearly 47.2% is worse in alternative math and a horrendous total befitting a loser which our current president is not.

But elections are not won based on the popular vote but through the Electoral College. Here our new president with 306 votes minus 2 electors who declined to vote for him claims a landslide even with 46.1% of the popular vote. So let’s look at the presidential elections of the last century without compensating for Hawaii and Alaska becoming states.

Republicans with over 400 Electoral Votes

1984 Ronald Reagan 525
1972 Richard Nixon 520
1980 Ronald Reagan 489
1956 Dwight Eisenhower 457
1928 Herbert Hoover 444
1952 Dwight Eisenhower 432
1988 George Bush 426
1920 Warren Harding 404

Democrats with over 400 Electoral Votes

1936 Franklin Roosevelt 523
1964 Lyndon Johnson 486
1932 Franklin Roosevelt 472
1940 Franklin Roosevelt 449
1944 Franklin Roosevelt 432

Under the old math, the above elections were landslide; thanks to alternative math, 304 = 404. Pity the teachers who have students who embrace alternative math. Pity the people who buy products designed by people who embrace alternative math. Pity the passengers on a plane where the pilots embrace alternative math.

But there are other presidents who also won in landslides based on the Trump landslide.

1996 William Clinton 379
1992 William Clinton 370
2008 Barack Obama 365
2012 Barack Obama 332

Who knew that Donald Trump considered these Democrats to be landslide winners as well, even bigger winners than he was?

There are some results more comparable to the Electoral Votes totals for 2016.

1948 Harry Truman 303
1960 John Kennedy 303
1968 Richard Nixon 301
1976 Jimmy Carter 297
2004 George Bush 286
2000 George Bush 271

Perhaps when our new president referred to his election as a landslide he was only referring to these other winners who all were losers compared to his 304 votes. We will never know because he will never explain what he meant. Pity the English teachers who have students who embrace alternative vocabulary. On the other hand, George Orwell’s 1984 now will make perfect sense:

War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
304 is 404.

Finally there is the issue of the 3-5 million illegal voters. The number goes far beyond the graveyard votes in Chicago or the walking-around-money to generate votes in Philadelphia. Does he mean that roughly half the adults here illegally who tend to operate under the radar all were instructed to venture forth into the public into government facilities to pose as American citizens who could vote? Were they all in California which has about 13.7 million voters meaning 1 in 4 was illegal? Perhaps he is not aware that zombies are permitted to vote in California where voting rights have been extended to the living dead since they are human beings. Vampires can vote there too. Have you seen some of the actors in Hollywood? Don’t they look like death warmed over? Vulcans and Klingons, however, are not human and do not qualify. And since California routinely votes Democratic anyway, why perpetrate a massive fraud where none is necessary to claim the electoral votes in the first place?

A fraud of this magnitude dwarfs by fivefold the effort to launch the D=Day invasion. That effort took at least a year of planning and was commanded by someone who later became president in two landslide elections. Clearly the mastermind of this electoral fraud deserves accolades for the scope of the achievement. Just think of the number of election precincts involved. And these people didn’t just vote for the president at the top of the ticket. What about all the Congressional and state contests effected? When all is said and done, the conspiracy to deny Donald Trump his rightful popular election vote will go down as the single greatest fraud in the history of humanity save for the faked lunar landings. All Americans owe Donald Trump a debt of thanks for exposing the millions of aliens who are hidden in Area 51 who only come out on Election Day.

Undoubtedly we will learn more about the fraudulent votes when the federal investigation is completed. My understanding is the White House plans to hire the same detectives OJ used to track down the real killer and that Trump himself used to uncover the truth in Hawaii about Obama’s birth. According to our president the results of that investigation were so startlingly, you “can not believe what they are finding.” So far he has not released the findings of those detectives pending the completion of the audit on his taxes but perhaps he can be encouraged to do so.

In the meantime, let the tweet go forward to friend and foe alike. If you were registered in two states, we will hunt you down. We fill find you wherever you hide. You will be caught. You will be waterboarded. You will tell the truth about the conspiracy no matter how high it reaches. You will be hanged. You will be drawn and quartered. You will be boiled in oil. Sad.

Does his existence in Trumpietown, his counterpart to Hillaryland, mean that Democrats should be complacent about regaining the White House in 2020? Should the Democrats exult because the foe in 2020 is an immature child? No way, no how. But explaining the Democratic tunnel-vision silliness requires another post. None-the-less, the battle is engaged.

Empire State Presidential Elections (2016): A Day in Infamy

August 6, 2016
by Peter Feinman
Pearl Harbor: The Original Day in Infamy

New York has not always been the Empire State. When the United States was first constituted, the nation’s first capital was New York City (meaning Manhattan). During the American Revolution, Washington spent more time in this state than in any other. New York, the city that he had abandoned, remained an elusive target even though physically fixed. He constantly hovered in the vicinity hoping to be able to dislodge the British but he never succeeded in doing so. Now he returned to the city as president of the country.

Philadelphia was still the premier city of the land. It remained so for a few more decades but then the torch was passed to a new powerhouse. New York became the Empire State during the 1820s. One might associate the timing with the completion of the Erie Canal (the bicentennial of its construction begins in 2017). However even before, the handwriting was on the wall for all to see. Immigrants poured into the state from overseas and from New England. Emblematic of the change was Tom Cole’s relocation from Philadelphia to Manhattan and the birth of the nation’s first art form which was named after the Hudson River.

As an emerging political power, the Empire State immediately became involved in presidential elections. The Virginia Dynasty had reached its end. The jockeying for position in the 1824 election witnessed the transition from the first party system of Federalists and Republicans to the second party system of Whigs and Democrats. Donald Ratcliffe’s new book, One-Party Presidential Contest: Adams, Jackson and 1824’s Five-Horse Race was the topic of a session at the annual conference of the Society for the Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) on July 24 which I attended.

In hindsight, that election served as a preview of the 1828 election. The winning ticket then consisted of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. Van Buren succeeded Jackson as president taking office in 1837, the first New Yorker to become president of the United States. Jackson and Van Buren formed the first diverse ticket for the white male voters of early American history. Jackson was Scotch-Irish and Van Buren was Dutch. Based on the racial classification system today, they both would be classified as dead white men. However, in their world, they represented two constituencies not previously in national office. They lived in a world where people knew if they were German Palatines, Scotch-Irish, French Huguenots, Congregational English, Anglican English, and so on. Together, Jackson and Van Buren shattered the Virginia/Massachusetts dominance of the presidency.

Prior to be coming president Van Buren served as governor of New York. His lived at his home in Kinderhook, Columbia County, for 21 years and was buried in the Dutch Reform Church cemetery nearby. His home is now a National Park Service historic site.

The Dutch ancestry continued with two famous and distantly-related Empire State presidents, Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt. These two well-known luminaries need no introduction for their impact on American history. Both Roosevelts served as New York State governors before becoming president as did the less well-known Grover Cleveland. There are three National Park Service sites for Teddy in New York: his birth place in New York City, his home for decades in Long Island, and the Buffalo site where he was unexpectedly inaugurated following the assassination of McKinley. Franklin and his wife Eleanor have homes, cottages, and the first presidential  library in Hyde Park where he grew up and was a local historian.

It seemed as if Roosevelt would be succeeded in the next presidential election after his death by another New York State governor. Millions of people went to sleep on election night thinking that Thomas E. Dewey had defeated Harry Truman generating one of the most famous newspaper headlines in American history. His defeat in 1948 was his second one. In the 1944 election, two New Yorkers from Dutchess County, the current governor and the former governor, squared off against each other, the only time such an event occurred in American history.

The 1944 election represented the height of Empire State presidential elections. Another prominent New York State governor, Nelson Rockefeller, repeatedly sought the nomination without ever attaining it. Because of fluke circumstances probably never to be repeated, he did end up becoming Vice President under Gerald Ford. Rockefeller’s home never became a National Park Service historic site but the Rockefeller-initiated Historic Hudson Valley operates his Kykuit estate.

Governor Mario Cuomo, the famed Hamlet on the Hudson, appeared on the brink of declaring his candidacy on multiple occasions but never announced. If elected he would have become the first Italian and Ellis Island president. To date their never has been either.

Governor Elliott Sptitzer had ambitions of becoming the first Jewish and Ellis Island president but that vision was abruptly curtailed. As it turn out, Brooklyn-raised Bernie Sanders was the first Jewish candidate to win a presidential primary in a national party election even though the party establishment actively worked against him.

Governor Andy Cuomo has ambitions to become president but the chance to even seek the nomination seems unlikely. The opportunity for a white ethnic whose ancestors arrived at Ellis Island seems to have come and gone without it ever happening. The best way for someone of Italian ancestry becoming president appears to be if that person arrived not via Ellis Island but on a jet from Latin America where the ancestors first had migrated.

This brief survey brings us to the election of 2016 where once again there are two legal residents of New York State running for president of the United States. These two candidates share much in common. Neither one ever was governor of the state as were the previous New York presidential candidates. In fact neither one has ever held any political office of executive power in New York or anywhere else: never a mayor, never a town supervisor, never a county executive. Now in the Medicare years of their lives, for the first time, suddenly they want the buck to stop with them with the promise that it won’t be bankruptcy #8 or #18 or #118 or from Wall Street. It’s not as if they won D-Day or rescued the Winter Olympics either. They share a lack of experience in real-world executive political decision-making. Let’s gamble.

The National Park Service will be hard-pressed to select a house or home for winner. The Democratic candidate has no real home. She has no ties to Illinois and her youth and no ties to Arkansas which was a stopover on the way to where she really wanted to live. At present, she has a home in Chappaqua for legal purposes so she can return to the beltway which is the only place she ever wanted to live. From 1993 to 2025, unlike George Washington from 1775 to 1783, she will have spent more time in Washington than New York by far. In fact, she will have spent such little time living in New York she probably doesn’t even have to pay New York State income tax even for speeches given in the same neighborhood where Washington presided. By default, the National Park Service may have to operate the infrequently used house best known for hosting a server that exposed her to be a recklessly careless liar where she was tested and failed at crisis management. As the cherry tree is for George Washington and the log cabin is for Abraham Lincoln, so the server will become the symbol of the woman who never tried to achieve on her own. Everyone will take a selfie there. That should be some NPS tour.

Our two Empire State presidential candidates share even more in common.

* They have the highest unfavorables of any two candidates in American history.
* They are the most disrespected by people of their own parties.
* They aren’t remotely capable of being the nation’s comfiter in-chief.
* They aren’t remotely capable of healing the wounds that divide us.
* They aren’t remotely capable of rising to the occasion.

NYT (8/4/16): “Allies [of the Democratic candidate] remain skittish and say that by many measures, Mrs. Clinton is a weak candidate with a muddled message who faces an electorate in which a majority of voters do not trust or like her. But Mr. Trump’s inability to seize on his own party’s convention and emerge a more disciplined candidate has eased early concerns that he could appeal to a broader electorate in the fall…[A political consultant] has pointed out that no candidate has come out of a convention with unfavorable ratings as high as Mrs. Clinton’s and gone on to win the White House. But unlike most candidates, Mrs. Clinton faces a fall contest against an opponent who is even more disliked.”

Teaching this election will be a nightmare future teachers will try to avoid.

Our two Empire State presidential candidates are not identical. Since everything you need to know you can learn from Star Trek, it is appropriate to turn there for insight. In the episode, the Children Shall Lead, the children on an outpost are rendered orphans but display no trauma over the horror of losing their parents. The cause is a beast called “Angel” by them and named Gorgan. The richly-costumed sleekly-haired human-looking monster is skilled in exploiting their   pain to service his gain. He dominates them and in the ways of science fiction takes control of the Starship Enterprise.

Not to worry. Kirk’s dedication to the spirit of Star Trek prevails. His hero and role model is, after all, Abraham Lincoln. He takes back his ship. He takes back his crew. He returns the Enterprise to its rightful path. He defeats the monstrosity that has temporarily commandeered them. In the final showdown between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, Kirk calls on the deceived children to see the ugliness of the monster who led them astray. He tells them:

Without you children he’s nothing.
The evil remains within him.
Look how ugly he really is.
Look at him and don’t be afraid.

With each phrase, the children see more and more of the truth and the image of the monster becomes uglier and uglier. In the end, Gorgan is revealed as the grotesque monster he always was underneath his superficial exterior. As befitting his debased nature, when exposed for the disgusting ugly incarnation of evil that he is, his parting words to his former admirers who now spurn him are:

Death to you all!
Death to you all!
Death to you all!

Who knew this story set in the 23rd century really was about 21st? What happens if the party of Lincoln seeks to take back its party from ugliness? What happens if non-elite heterosexual white males who love their country and are in pain catch on that they are being slicked, conned, hustled, flim-flammed, bamboozled and lied to by a staggeringly ignorant narcissist who just as easily would rip them off at his phony university for their desire to live the American Dream as he would for their vote?

Consider now the words of the Democrat/Republican Roosevelts from the time when the Empire State produced presidents who were giants:

We stand at Armageddon…
And have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Contrast those words of American history with the teeny-tinies today:

It’s midnight in America.
Jabber, jabber, jabber, I am a woman. Jabber, jabber, jabber, I am a victim. Jabber, jabber, jabber, it’s my turn now. Jabber, jabber, jabber ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

The election between a junior high-school smart-aleck and a high-school good-little mean girl guarantees that our next president will not be a thinking adult. For generations to come, Americans will have to explain how we allowed to occur this self-inflicted day of infamy.
NYT (8/3/16): “It all has left her [a voter] uncertain of which candidate, if any to support.

Hillary?
“No. Next question.”
Trump?
“No.”
Well?
“I’m really praying that between now and November there’s some clarity, that somebody shows some leadership.

The Final Balloon Drop