The Fifth Risk: Why Government Is Necessary

Michael Lewis has in 219 pages outlined what is wrong with Trumpism.

Michael Lewis 

And what is Trumpism?  At it's essence is the conviction we do not need government except for two things: Military might and defending our borders.

What Lewis shows, by telling stories of various admirable people who chose to work in the federal government, is how important the daily workings of the federal government really are: The Department of Commerce, which is really the department of Data, which collects weather data and transforms it into weather predictions. The Department of Agriculture, which is really the Department of Rural Development and the Department of Science and Technology.

Part of the problem is the names of the various Departments are misleading. We know what Defense and State do, even though those, too are misnomers: These are really the Department of War and the Department of Foreign Affairs. But most of us do not know or understand what Commerce or Agriculture do.

Growing up in the Washington suburbs, I went to school with the kids of Congressmen--this was back when Congressmen, especially Senators, moved their families to Washington and lived there--but most of the parent of kids I went to high school with worked for agencies like Standards and Measurement or NOAA or the National Institutes of Health, or NASA.

They did things like figuring out how much stuff had to be in building materials so skyscrapers wouldn't collapse, or figuring out how to predict tornadoes in time to warn people to take cover. They were involved in collecting huge troves of data which allowed airplanes to fly, buildings and bridges to remain functional. They did all the work which was too expensive or unprofitable for private enterprise to be interested in doing but which made private enterprise profitable--like developing something called "the world wide web" and the internet. 

These are the people of what Trump's friends at Fox News call "the deep state." These are the men and women vilified by Steve Bannon:  All those nefarious civil servants who Trump wants to root out.

People like the folks at the Department of Agriculture who, with astonishing speed, developed a lab test for bird flu so only a few million chickens had to be culled rather than hundreds of millions, and who protect us from Mad Cow Disease getting into McDonald's burgers across the land, or Toni Fauci, who heads the institute at the NIH which oversaw the identification and treatment of HIV/AIDS.

Toni Fauci

But as Lewis demonstrates, the men President Trump has appointed to run these departments have either been actively hostile to the idea of what they might be doing-- without actually knowing--like Rick Perry who thought the Department of Energy was all about funding solar energy, killing "clean coal" and proving climate change was man made, and was clueless about it's more important mission, which is to track loose nukes (stolen nuclear war heads) to insure our own nuclear arsenal is maintained safely and to clean up vast areas contaminated by previous nuclear bomb building factories which currently are moving in subterranean drift toward the Columbia River.

Rick Perry

Wilbur Ross, who heads Commerce, thought the business of Commerce was business and tariffs and had no idea it is actually the main data collection center of the federal government, which does the census, tracks water temperatures, weather patterns and most of the data on the planet's natural phenomenon which control fisheries, airplane and ship travel, and when he was told about these other, more important functions said he was not interested in any of that.

Wilbur Ross

And there is Barry Myers, who founded a commercial weather prediction company which predicted a tornado would hit a town in Oklahoma but informed only his subscribers so the rest of the population of that town was struck without warning, whose company, Accu Weather, functions completely dependent on weather data collected by the federal government's National Weather Service (part of NOAA) but who considers the government a competitor and sought to become Secretary of Commerce so he could strip the Weather Service of its capacity to offer its services to any company but his own. 

Barry Meyers

All of this is the devil in the details. 
We think we know the venality and avarice and sheer depravity of Trump and those who sail with him from the Trump tweets and from CNN, but the details of these banal creeps who have swarmed in to eat out our government from the inside is only apparent when you dig into it with someone like Lewis. 

Reading Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 2018

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a Democratic United States Senator from New York, an academic, an ambassador to the United Nations, but he is best remembered as an adviser to Richard Nixon.

Like many academics, he seemed happiest when he didn't have to do anything to accomplish change but could simply write a paper and watch the person or people in power execute his advice.

Nixon, like Trump, was not a deep thinker, a policy wonk.  
It is said there are 3 types of Congressmen: pot hole fillers, politicians, policy wonks, which is to say people who do constituent services, people who only care about getting re elected and people who like the idea of manipulating rules and systems to achieve big goals. 

This applies to Presidents as well. Nixon and Trump clearly had no real interest in anything but staying in power and getting re elected. 

So, it is natural that the President would put in place some people to tell him what to think and what to do.

In 1968 Moynihan was writing memos about the problem of global warming and CO2 emissions and burning fossil fuels.

He also wrote the famous memo, promptly leaked to the press, about "benign neglect" in the case of racial relations. What he actually was saying is there had already been too much said about race, that it began and ended every discussion and enough already!

Reading his memos to Nixon one sees the gauche pandering to a damaged ego, a friendly therapist who knows he is dealing with a fragile psyche he is being careful to bring along.

But the big take home is how very much more volatile and tumultuous the 1960's and 1970's were than what we have now with the Trumpling. American soldiers were coming home in body bags, or limbless, and were murdering Vietnamese villagers, women and babies at Mylai; demonstrations  were drawing hundreds of thousands; National Guardsmen murdered 4 students on a college campus; large parts of the inner cities were being burned down; white racist Southerners were murdering white Freedom Riders and black people; women were still not advancing in the workplace.

Compared to all that, the Trumpling is merely a malodorous cloud of gas emanating from the hind parts of a dyspeptic and flatulent nation.

B.S. "Big Sissy" Trump

Mad Dog has been trying to come up with a moniker for the Trumpling, in an effort to respond to his joyous playground practice of hitting his targets with mud pies like, "Adam Schitt" and "Little Marco" and "Pocahontas" and "Low Energy Jeb," and "Da Nang Dick Blumenthal."

Oh, we've all heard "When they go low, we go high."

And we've heard the advice you can't out Trump Trump.
But the fact is, you do not stand up to bullies by smiling in a superior adult way.

But the fact is, there is a certain potency in these jibes. He really does identify the most vulnerable thing about a person and goes for that.  Elizabeth Warren, that Waspy blue eyed blonde, claiming to be a Native American on an Harvard application, Richard Blumenthal caught in the lie of claiming to have seen combat in Viet Nam-- those speak to real flaws, disqualifying flaws of character because they are grounded in truth, however distorted or over played. 

So what is the undeniable vulnerability in Mr. Trump?


Joe Biden roused some spirit among dispirited Democrats by saying he'd take Trump out in the alley and beat the shit out of him, but Biden faded from the scene.

After Nancy Pelosi walked out of the White House, she joined fellow Democrats back on Capital Hill and she reportedly said, 
“It’s like a manhood thing with him — as if manhood can be associated with him,” Pelosi deadpanned. “This wall thing.”

And that is exactly what we need.
The appellation is now obvious. Listen to Trump talking about the wall. He quakes and quails about the nasty, dangerous, scary dark skinned people on the other side of the border, and he wants to build a wall to keep them out.

He is terrified. Dark people scare him. Violent people scare him. He will not visit the troops because he's afraid of being shot. 

He is, in fact, a Big Sissy, which would make it B.S. "Big Sissy" Trump.

All this time we have been searching for alliteration.
And all along the truth was right in front of us.