Every game has a winner. And a loser. The trick is figuring out which is which before the game is over.
That’s what we’re trying to do right now in contests and conflicts around the country and around the world. In some, freedom is at stake. In others, the rule of law. And in even more, democracy.
The conflict around the world is the war in Ukraine. The latest news is encouraging: Ukraine’s forces have taken back land that Russia grabbed. People are flying the Ukrainian flag again in more than a thousand square miles of their nation.
But there’s a difference between winning the battle and winning the war. It’s only a thousand square miles that Ukraine recaptured out of somewhere between 17,000 and 23,000 that Russia had taken, beginning with its seizure of Crimea more than eight years ago. But the good news is, the land Ukraine reclaimed has been geographically vital to Russia’s invasion— airfields, military depots, staging areas that it has used to wage its war. Russia is weakened without it. And by all accounts, with troops abandoning their weapons and running from their crumbling lines, its retreat has been ugly.
However, even if Ukraine keeps advancing and Russia keeps retreating, a recent report on the damage already done there is almost unimaginable: roads and bridges demolished, factories and hospitals, stores and shopping malls, bus depots and train stations and airports, critical utilities like power and water, and the homes of nearly a million citizens. Estimates to rebuild— the cost to put this battered nation back together— go as high as three-quarters of a trillion dollars.
What’s worse, the longer the war wears on, the higher that figure climbs. There will likely be generous pledges but the reality is, who can pay for it— who will pay for it— is anyone’s guess.
Yet to hear President Zelinsky tell it, although outmanned and outgunned, Ukraine will not waver. “Read my lips,” he defiantly posted online Sunday in a message to President Putin. “Without gas or without you? Without you. Without light or without you? Without you. Without water or without you? Without you. Without food or without you? Without you.”
Then there are the games people are playing here at home.
Begin with Donald Trump’s game with the documents designated “top secret” that the FBI seized at Mar-a-Lago.
That led our country’s mercurial onetime commander-in-chief to call the men and women of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, because they enforced the law, “vicious monsters.” In a filing yesterday, his lawyers dismissed the whole affair as “a document storage dispute that has spiraled out of control.” That’s like calling Bernard Madoff’s $65-billion Ponzi scam “an investment dispute that spiraled out of control.”
The ex-president won the first round of the game when a federal judge he’d appointed midway through his last year in office, who wasn’t even confirmed until after Trump lost his re-election, forced a delay in the Justice Department’s investigation by allowing a “special master” to examine the documents. As she reasoned in her ruling, without such an examination the ex-president might suffer “reputational harm.” In other words, “The stigma… is in a league of its own.”
What she left unsaid, of course, is that Trump’s unlawful possession of government property, let alone top secret government property, was in a league of its own. It’s as if this judge is replacing the time-worn American principles of “All men are created equal” and “No one is above the law” with the doctrine of what she calls “unquantifiable potential harm.” What someone ought to tell her is, too bad; the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Especially ex-presidents. On his Substack website Steady, Dan Rather put it clearly: “The truth is that the president of the United States is afforded many special privileges and powers. But they reside in the office and not the person. Donald Trump is no longer president.” But evidently in the mind of this federal judge in Florida, the bigger they are, the softer they fall, because some men are above the law, some men are more equal than others.
She has played right into the game being waged these days over the United States Supreme Court. Mindful of wide-ranging censure of the Court’s very legitimacy after it abandoned legal precedent— known as “stare decisis”— and overturned Roe v. Wade, Chief Justice John Roberts told a judicial conference last weekend in Colorado Springs, “Simply because people disagree with an opinion is not a basis for questioning the legitimacy of the court.”
But on a CNN program Sunday, former senator Al Franken accurately argued that the Court’s legitimacy was undermined long before the repeal of Roe. He pointed to 2016 when Mitch McConnell blocked President Obama’s High Court nominee (current Attorney General Merrick Garland) from even getting a hearing to replace the deceased Justice Antonin Scalia, claiming that with a presidential election coming up a mere eight months later, "the American people should have a say in the court's direction.” So we ended up instead with Trump nominee Justice Neil Gorsuch. And then along came Amy Coney Barrett, who Trump nominated only two months before the 2020 election after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. McConnell and his party rammed that one through only a week before Election Day.
“They’ve stolen two seats,” Franken said. “The one that Merrick Garland wasn’t given a hearing for, and the one when Coney Barrett… was seated a week before the election. That destroyed the legitimacy of the court.” Chief Justice Roberts once rightly instructed Donald Trump that “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges… What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.” But against the backdrop of such raw political hypocrisy, coupled with the decision on Roe, that’s a hard argument to make anymore.
Finally, there’s the game that Trump and his acolytes are playing with democracy. Three examples from this week’s news.
First, according to the political website FiveThirtyEight, a full third of Republican nominees for major federal or state offices across the country faithfully profess that Trump won what was a rigged election in 2020. Those who win what they’re running for are a threat to future fair elections.
Second, a lawsuit has been filed in Michigan that would require the governor and the secretary of state to “work together to rerun the Michigan 2020 presidential election as soon as possible.” Like their right-wing cohorts elsewhere, they still haven’t offered a shred of substantiation that it’s necessary.
And third, just when you think Trump and his Trumpcolytes couldn’t get any more undemocratic, any more unpatriotic, you get the likes of Texas Representative Louie Gohmert. Friday, he honored a January 6th insurrectionist named Simone Gold, who was sentenced to 60 days in federal prison for invading the Capitol, calling her “a political prisoner,” and upon her release, presenting her with an American flag that once flew over the Capitol’s dome. Gohmert said her imprisonment was “something I never thought I’d see here in the United States of America.” Conspicuously he failed to say that an insurrection was also something he never thought he’d see.
If there is a winner and a loser in every game, heaven help our world if the wrong people in these games win.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Terrific piece, synthesizing the storm around a simple concept. As Dan Rather put it, it's about the office, not its holder. But Trump put it best in his usual manner of defining others by what he sees in the mirror. "Vicious monsters" upheld the law. (Finally.)
Great column, Greg. And in each case, oh, so true. Thank you.