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(Thirteen months ago, almost to the day, I posted this blog criticizing NBC for creating the television career of the Vulgarian Trump, and paying him more than $200 million for aggrandizing his piggish, demeaning, sexist ways on a national TV network. In the immediate aftermath of the revelations of the Trump Sex Abuse Tapes, done in conjunction with another NBC employee, Billy Bush, I reposted my essay. That was two months ago. I’ve revised this essay now that NBC has decided to reclaim their evil spawn, by re-hiring him as Executive Producer of “The Apprentice.” Mark Burnett is not yet revealing how much they’ll be paying the Kleptocrat-in-Chief. Emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution anyone? Impeachment?
Tom Brokaw’s two and one-half minute noble tsk-tsking of Donald Trump’s full-blown Fascism — coming at the tail end of a little-watched Tuesday night 6 pm newscast over a year ago — was far too little, way too late from the Broadcast network which made Trump an international TV star and helped launch his political career.
Now that Trump’s big, ugly Un-American backside has been bared for all to see, those wonderful folks who gave this monster a global platform to pedal his pernicious views, are beginning to have some second thoughts, but very few have anything to do with soul searching. NBC, for example did pay Donald Trump a total of $213, 606, 575 in salary to host 14 seasons of “The Apprentice” — an average of about $15 million per season, according to documents Trump’s campaign filed with the Federal Elections Commission.

Then, after they handed Trump the bully’s pulpit to pick on everyone from the disabled, to Mexicans, to Syrian Refugees, to wounded war veterans, to Muslims, NBC — no longer seeing profit in Trump’s pugnaciousness — fired the Towering Inferno after he insulted all Mexicans in late June, 2015, during his announcement for President. NBC’s Latino market was just too big for the network to fail. But now, that the NBC/Comcast stellar citizens see a chance to make almost as much money off a Trump presidency than the Kleptocrat-in-Chief himself, they’re inviting the pig back to the trough.
Financially, as well as cosmetically, NBC’s announcement to Dump Trump last year was good business. Following its’ first five years, “ The Apprentice” began to rapidly lose market share. NBC meanwhile, had become the NBC/Universal/Comcast monolith after 2009, rolling up big new profits in its cable, movie and amusement park businesses. But now, NBC’s high dudgeon over Trump’s filthy mouth, racist and sexist slurs, has disappeared: they’re clamoring to get back into the pocket of the Kleptocrat they created.
NBC and Burnett made Donald Trump — long viewed as another wannabe starlet in New York politics–richer, far more famous, and extraordinarily more powerful than he had ever been before. Trump’s little inheritance of his father’s real estate fortune — built with federal funds for constructing middle-income housing, and keeping Blacks out of that housing — and even a New York Daily News front page headline boasting of the “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had” with Marla Maples, weren’t enough to get him the kind of attention he craved. Before his stint at NBC, Trump looked like a silly little post-card painter without serious recognition of his talent.
Then along came Mark Burnett and NBC, and the inner Trump was let loose in the living rooms of millions of Americans through the mindlessness of Reality TV. Burnett, Trump’s co-producer on “Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice”, and a prime mover in bringing Reality TV to American television with his “Survivor” in 2000, and other programming such as “The Voice,” “Shark Tank,” “ Sarah Palin’s Alaska (yes, that too) and, the aptly named “Are you smarter than a fifth-grader?” boasts a net worth estimated at somewhere between $385 million to $450 million — a small fortune built on convincing Americans that eating bugs and spitting bile at people was entertainment. Trump spotted a winning formula for his brand of bragadaccio, and a malleable audience to swallow his hollow values and hateful views.
Forbes reported earlier this year that Trump’s entertainment-related income since 2004 — the first, and most successful year of “The Apprentice”– was approximately $500 million, from his books, speeches, beauty pageants and Reality-TV employment, the bulk of which, came from NBC, and was made possible by his ten-year run on the NBC aired reality show–including nearly $100 million in product-placement fees Trump and “Apprentice” co-producer Burnett got from shaking down program sponsors like Pepsi and Crest.
NBC can roll out all of the Tom Brokaw mea culpa commentaries it wants; pretend to be righteous by having Joe Scarborough cut off Trump after allowing the Quasimodo of Queens to rant on, or even continue to allow MSNBC to operate. The network conglomerate created this monster, and, with the willing leadership of programming ghouls like Mark Burnett and Jeff Zucker at the time (who went on to greater shame at CNN), NBC disarmed the audience of any analytical ability to recognize that its collective brain was being snatched, and now, it’s pockets being picked as well.
Sleep well, NBC & Comcast’s Brian Roberts and Steve Burke: you’ve enabled the raping and pillaging of the country, but, at least, you and the Kleptocrat-in-Chief are making money

Eva, Eva, Conway Braun,

Sitting on the White House lawn.

Smiling like a bulb so bright–

God, her face is such a fright.

Mercenary Mercer’s girl

Shills for vilest of them all.

Akins’ rapin’ was legit;

Carson, Newt & Cruz: such shit.

Eva Conway, Eva Braun,

Mendacious men know she’s their pawn.

Mercer’s money, Bannon’s bile

Lure her to the basest pile.

When the Fuhrer waves his hair,

Eva Conway Braun is there…

When his tiny lips spit lies,

Eva stamps them with her eyes.

Eva, Eva, Conway Braun,

Naked on the White House lawn.

Stripped of every shred of self,

Cyanide pill on her shelf.

I was going to wait longer than two weeks after the Presidential Election of 2016 to tell this insider’s story about Hillary Clinton’s campaign for President.

The looming deadline of this Friday, November 25, for Clinton supporters to step-up and challenge questionable vote tallies and voter suppression tactics in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania has compelled me to come forward now.   Bold, legal actions on the part of the Clinton campaign—unlike the tepid response of Al Gore 16 years ago—hold the possibility of setting aside this year’s election results on the basis of constitutional and voting rights violations.

Whether or not the Clinton campaign has the courage to do it is another question entirely. What’s at stake is nothing less than American democracy, and the rights of free citizens to vote.

I experienced the campaign’s lack of courage first hand when I traveled to North Carolina to do Voter Protection for Hillary Clinton for the last four weeks before the election. As a Californian, with friends and former labor union colleagues in Raleigh, I chose to work in North Carolina—at my own expense—for two reasons: 1. The state’s history of voter suppression in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby; 2) the critical importance of North Carolina as a swing or “checkmate” state for the Clinton campaign.

The North Carolina Democratic Coordinated Campaign knew I was an activist writer when they agreed to take me on as a full-time, unpaid volunteer at their Raleigh, NC, headquarters. I was assigned to do Voter Protection, because of my law degree and my expressed interest in the area.

During my first week of working with the campaign, I studied the State’s Election Law, the Federal Judge’s July decision overturning North Carolina’s Voter “suppression” law of 2013 as “surgical discrimination,” and sat in on two training sessions for citizens volunteering to participate in voter protection activities at the polls. I was impressed by the volunteers: law-abiding, fellow Baby Boomers, passionately devoted to protecting people’s right to vote, as their civic duty.

On Sunday, October 16, following a terrific Voter Protection training session in Wilmington, NC, I awoke to the news that a GOP campaign office in Hillsborough, Orange County, was firebombed during the night. The office was rarely used by GOP campaign workers, a local Republican operative told me, and the message and technique of the single Molotov cocktail bombing was suspicious. Within hours of the bombing, Donald Trump took to twitter to pin the illegal act on “Hillary Clinton supporters” and “Democrats” with no evidence. Having worked with both of those groups, I knew those charges were patently false, and smacked of a too-quickly issued cover for a crime, still unsolved five weeks later.

So, I did what I do. I wrote about the incident as someone with first-hand knowledge of the decent people accused of a crime they did not commit. To me it smelled like the “Reichstag Fire,” of 1933, when the Nazi’s blamed the communists and Jews for starting a blaze in the German Parliament—a fire started by the Nazis themselves.

The National Memo, published my piece, and I circulated it on my blog and on medium.com.   The piece was a powerful defense of the North Carolina Democrats and their respect for the rule of law and The National Memo’s headline reflected that: “Why North Carolina Democrats Would Never Bomb Orange County GOP Office.”   Among the reasons I gave was that Orange County, NC—which contains the University of North Carolina– was one of the most reliably Democratic counties in the nation, giving Barack Obama over 70% of its vote each time he ran.

Monday morning, October 17, when the article was read by The National Memo’s 300,000 subscribers, the North Carolina Democratic Coordinated Campaign, was so upset by my article (particularly the paragraph where I wrote of the role the Reichstag Fire played in German political history) that they told me to either “take the piece down” or leave the campaign by the end of the day.

I refused to “take down” the piece, citing my First Amendment Rights to write what I pleased, both as a professional writer and as a private citizen. I was an unpaid volunteer doing Voter Protection, who traveled from California to North Carolina on my own dime and the campaign could not censor me. The Clinton Campaign’s 20-something-year-old- paid Communications Director for North Carolina was officious and inflexible, fearing any fallout that could come from my article. He insisted that I “take it down”, or leave the campaign office immediately. Again, I refused to “take my article down”—a preposterous request, since the piece had already been circulated nationwide around the internet. I was escorted out of the campaign’s Raleigh office by mid-afternoon.

I spend the rest of my four weeks in North Carolina extensively covering the elections across the state, interviewing Trump and Clinton voters, attending events from the State Fair to rallies with both Obamas, Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton, closely examining the history of voter suppression of African American voters in the state, and writing a half-dozen stories for various media outlets. I came away with an in-depth view of the kind of cautious, take-no-chances campaign waged by the Clinton team in North Carolina and across the nation, that made it possible for the hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners Trump campaign to prevail—at least until now.

Whether the Clinton camp musters the courage to challenge clear voting rights violations in several key swing states which tipped the Electoral College to the candidate trailing by two million popular votes, will determine if the nation will pay the price for a campaign afraid of its own shadow.

The Pulitzer Prize winner author Viet Thanh Nguyen in his masterpiece The Sympathizer, has a remarkable passage toward the end of his book which takes away my breath by it’s sheer force and power.

The long paragraph runs across pages 353 and 354 of the paperback version of the book, over 40 lines, is punctuated by semi-colons, and populated heavily by a set of “ifs.” The super sentence suggests how different the world, and his character’s life, would have been, “If” only certain events had or had not happened:

“…if history’s ship had taken a different tack, if I had become an accountant…if we forgot our resentment, if we forget revenge; if we acknowledged that we are all puppets in someone else’s play, if we had not fought a war against each other; if some of us had not called ourselves nationalists or communists or capitalists or realists…”

I first read Nguyen’s haunting language during the early summer of the American Presidential campaign of 2016, and repeated the “if” sequence dozens of times during the campaign’s closing days. I traveled around North Carolina observing Barack & Michelle Obama, and Elizabeth Warren try mightily to win the important swing state for Hillary Clinton. I interviewed dozens of voters for Clinton, Trump or “unaffiliated,” entered historic African-American churches constructed since before slavery was dismantled, and listened to the rhythm of the voices of the citizens with whom I spoke. The cadence of their language echoed Nguyen’s:

If history had taken a quicker turn toward the arc of justice, if everyone’s skin color were the same; if furniture were still being made in North Carolina’s factories, and clothing in it’s mills; if I had become an attorney or a diplomat and moved away; if my Jesus could sit down and have a beer with yours, and pick ribs clean together; if I was not frightened by the darkness of your skin and the bright, bold hope in your eyes, and if you did not resent my very existence on the same street where you lived as a sign of your own failure; if I was a teacher or a clergyman or a doctor and could heal your wounds, then maybe my touch would not be so repulsive to you; if I was raised to read about Rosie riveting airplane bolts as well as adoring the Blessed Mother; if Hilter had perhaps, found love, and the murders of millions never happened; if weapons were not invented that could vaporize thousands of children while they road their bicycles; if we acknowledged that we were all pawns in a game played by the rich and powerful; if we understood that killing because of someone’s choice for loving was an act of violence against ourselves.

If some of us had not called ourselves Democrats or Republicans or White Nationalists or Socialists or Pragmatists or Progressives; if there were no poor people or poor healthcare, or run down housing where roaches dart from room to room carrying our resentments; if Muskie hadn’t cried, nor Nixon lied, or Joe Biden’s son died, or, if Mario Cuomo tried, at least once, to be President; if we were all connected by more than a flickering screen, or image on an I-phone, like family, not alone, not so mean; if Trump’s father loved him more than money, or Bill Clinton fell down the steps leading to Loretta Lynch’s plane and expired before being exposed; if Hillary put her dog before the data and walked free among the trees in Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania a few more times; if more people thought, or read, or voted, or listened before talking, or choked on their own bile while spewing their vileness of hate; if there was a God or force or some High court that kept the good alive, and punished the evil for diminishing the dignity of others, then maybe…maybe I could sleep, just sleep through the night. If.

I grew quieter as the night grew longer, holding out the slimmest sliver of hope for a bunch of late votes to come in from Philadelphia or Detroit or Milwaukee or any pocket of promise where the optimism and beliefs of Blacks or Latinos, smart women and caring young men would save us from ourselves. I sat with a group of long-time friends in Raleigh, as we silently watched North Carolina slip away despite weeks and days and hours of work and passion to turn the lush, green state toward the sunlight, and away from the ominous elements of its dark past.
I wondered what I would say to my granddaughters, ages 7 and 5, and almost one, when I saw them this week, after they welcomed me back to California from spending four weeks in North Carolina to bring them back the first woman President in the nation’s history, and show them that, yes, girls could do and be anything. I smiled to myself, knowing they already knew that, since their mother and father show them that each moment of every day with unconditional love and belief in all they do. There is no room for the luxury of despair when the bright eyes of babies await your every breath, and wink and word.
I thought of the scene in “Life Is Beautiful” when the Roberto Begnini’s character makes the brutality of Nazi occupation into a game of hide and seek, protecting his young son from the horrors of fascism and war. We grown-ups have far more than our own feelings and fears on which to focus. Children are watching us, sensing our moods, and hopelessness is the ultimate act of self-absorption.
I tried to go to sleep sometime around 3:00 a.m. after Hillary Clinton confirmed for us that the nightmare in our closet was real, and was no longer staying behind closed doors. I tossed and turned to try and break the fever dream, but visions of crashing financial markets, and crumbling constitutional protections were dancing wildly in my head. I remembered the same feeling in 1968, when I stayed up all night to watch Hubert Humphrey concede to Richard Nixon; in 1980, when Ronald Reagan crushed Jimmy Carter, and in 2000, when Florida’s hanging chads hung Al Gore and the rest of us out to dry. Then, too, I was in disbelief, over the Supreme Court deciding a Presidential election, and, for the first time, thought of moving to another country. But fleeing was against my nature, loyal-to-a fault to the people I love, and the places I am attached to.
We thought the world ended when the Towers fell on 9/11, and for thousands of people and their families, it did. They were my towers, where I worked for 6 years; they were all my children who died, and I cried uncontrollably when I first saw the 8 x 11 photo-copies of photos of all the “missing”, on the outside walls of St. Vincent’s Hospital in NYC. But, daily life continued for each of us, and we got up about our business the following morning and the day after that, and began to rebuild our lives and our world. I remember my niece, Camille, pregnant with her first child, due a few months later, sharing with me her concern over bringing a new life into such a terrible world. New life, I told her, new hope, is all the more important now, and so is greater love, as the only antidote to hatred and despair. I didn’t entirely believe what I said then, but knew I had to say it to rescue her from despair, and in time, I came to believe it myself. When my niece’s daughter Sophia was born, on Earth Day, 2002, her birth affirmed that the beauty of life and love and hope can bloom in the darkest of times.
In my four weeks in North Carolina leading up to the Election of 2016, I visited several African American churches. One was a 148-year old Presbyterian Church in downtown Raleigh; the other a 161-year old AME Zion Church in Fayetteville. I ran my hand over the date “1855” carved into the cornerstone of the Fayetteville church, dumbstruck that the church was there before slavery ended, and still stood sturdy today, the center of life, hope, love and powerful faith.
The churches and their communities had weathered enslavement, racism, terror, inequality, hatred and the pummeling of natural disasters, like hurricanes, which pounded them almost as relentlessly as the man-made ones. Yet they did not despair; they had no time for such luxuries. Life went on, and so did they.   So will we.
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