Intimidation Donald Trump is an expert at intimidation. Just look at the array of recent portraits of the man. He is making a habit of lowering his face and scowling at the audience from underneath his bushy eyebrows and fluffy yet wispy coif. He has perfected the snarl. He is under a rather strict gag order because his comments can energize a legion of faceless followers to reign down violence and distress on anyone that…
Stormy Days Today is the second day of the Stormy Daniels testimony in the Donald Trump falsification of business records case in Manhattan. Everyone is debating the importance of the Stormy Daniel testimony to the Trump case. We have all heard ad nauseam that it matters not whether anyone believes the sexual encounter actually occurred in 2006 between Trump and Stormy (my rhetorical question is, who among us does NOT believe that it did happen?),…
Interregnum It is often said that the most dangerous time in any country is that time in between one governing reign and another. The same is said of wars, that the times just before and just after the formal cessation of hostilities is actually the time when there is more risk afoot for the general population. Things and, indeed, people get lost in the transition, things fall between the cracks (does that really make sense…
Timeout The modern world is all about near constant engagement with media and outside stimulation. I read more and more about the growing crisis about youthful mental agitation which pre-dated COVID, but was clearly ratcheted up by the Pandemic. The growing amount of mental disruption and distress is particularly acute in young people who get a disproportionate amount of their interactions through social media. It used to be that difficult interactions among youngsters took the…
Heeeeere’s Donny There are few movie lines more memorable than Jack Nicholson sticking his head through a freshly axed bathroom door saying with a devilish smile, “Heeeeere’s Johnny!” The Shining, from which the line comes, is also right up there in the pantheon of scary movies. Well friends, we are in our own scary movie and while I need to substitute Johnny with Donny, the urgency and extreme nature of the threat to us all…
What We Value I pretty much ignored the “Trial of the Century” about the O.J. Simpson accusations that he killed his wife and her lover. That happened in 1995 and I was close to being at the height of my career in investment banking. I was busy running around the world and building a global investment business. It was the year that my youngest son was born. The last thing I cared about was the…
The Man of the Decade There is an old story about Donald Trump creating a phony Time’s Person of the Year cover to hang in one of his golf resorts. When we all heard that, we felt it was a pathetic sign of what a narcissist Trump is and how desperately he craves adoration and attention. This week, Trump has legitimately made it to the cover of Time magazine with the headline, “If he wins”.…
The Abortion of Humanity I have long considered abortion to be one of the thorniest policy issues in American politics. It strikes me as one of those issues that galvanizes people to the extreme and yet one that can be debated on grounds of morality ad infinitum. Ignoring the politics of the moment, the dimensions of the issue involve gender equality, primordial imperative of procreation, libertarianism, privacy, cultural norms about sex, the balancing of individual…
This is America This morning, as I prepare to spend the day going into the airport zone, my suspended animation state I adopt when traveling, I am affronted by two things I see on the news. The first is the back and forth that took place yesterday in the Supreme Court over the issue of presidential immunity in the case of Donald Trump v. The United States of America. While I still have a good…
It’s Happening… I am sitting in Eastern Tennessee in the heart of what surely is red America. We are wrapping up our trip here to Tennessee and the Deep South with some Smoky Mountain touring. We will go up on an aerial tramway to a wild animal sanctuary in Gatlinsburg and then come back here to Pidgeon Forge to end our visit with the Dollywood Stampede, whatever that is. It’s been an unusual and fun…