Disabled, or just desperate?

BEAVERTON, ALA.

The lobby at the pain-management clinic had become crowded with patients, so relatives had gone outside to their trucks to wait, and here, too, sat Desmond Spencer, smoking a 9 a.m. cigarette and watching the door. He tried stretching out his right leg, knowing these waits can take hours, and winced. He couldn’t sit easily for long, not anymore, and so he took a sip of soda and again thought about what he should do.

He hadn’t had a full-time job in a year. He was skipping meals to save money. He wore jeans torn open in the front and back. His body didn’t work like it once had. He limped in the days, and in the nights, his hands would swell and go numb, a reminder of years spent hammering nails. His right shoulder felt like it was starting to go, too.

Disabled America:
Between 1996 and 2015, the number of working-age adults receiving federal disability payments increased dramatically across the country — but nowhere more so than in rural America. In this series, The Washington Post explores how disability is shaping the culture, economy and politics of these small communities.

But did all of this pain mean he was disabled? Or was he just desperate?  He wouldn’t even turn 40 for a few more months. 

An hour passed, and his cellphone rang. He picked it up, said hello and hung up — another debt collector. He rubbed his right knee. Maybe it would get better. Maybe he would still find a job.

His mother had written a number the night before and told him to call it, and he had told her he’d think about it. She wanted him to apply for disability, like she had, like his girlfriend had, and like his stepfather, whom he now saw shuffling out of the pain clinic, hunched over his walker, reaching for a hand-rolled cigarette. Spencer got out of the truck. He lit his own.

“Remember we were talking about it last night?” he asked Gene Ruby. “Remember we were talking about signing up?”

“Yeah,” said Ruby, 64.

“Remember Mama said there was a number you got to call?”

“She’s got the number,” Ruby said. “The Social Security number.”

Spencer kept asking questions. What would Social Security want to know? How often are people denied? But he didn’t mention the one that had been bothering him the most lately: Was he a failure?

“There’s a stigma about it,” Spencer said, thinking aloud. “Disabled. Disability. Drawing a check. But if you’re putting food on the table, does it matter?”

Then: “I could probably still work.”

He put his stepfather’s walker in the truck bed, got behind the wheel, started another cigarette and, pulling out of the pain clinic’s parking lot, headed for home.

Across large swaths of the country, disability has become a force that has reshaped scores of mostly white, almost exclusively rural communities, where as many as one-third of working-age adults live on monthly disability checks, according to a Washington Post analysis of Social Security Administration statistics.

Rural America experienced the most rapid increase in disability rates over the past decade, the analysis found, amid broad growth in disability that was partly driven by demographic changes that are now slowing as disabled baby-boomers age into retirement. The increases have been worse in working-class areas, worse still in communities where residents are older, and worst of all in places with shrinking populations and few immigrants.

All but three of the 136 counties with the highest rates — where more than one in six working-age adults receive disability — were rural, the analysis found, although the vast majority of people on disability live in cities and suburbs.

The counties — spread out from northern Michigan, through the boot heel of Missouri and Appalachia, and into the Deep South — are largely racially homogeneous. Eighteen of the counties were majority black, but the remaining counties were, on average, 87 percent white. In the 2016 presidential election, the majority-white counties voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, whose rhetoric of a rotting nation with vast joblessness often reflects lived experiences in these communities.

Most people aren’t employed when they apply for disability — one reason applicant rates skyrocketed during the recession. Full-time employment would, in fact, disqualify most applicants. And once on it, few ever get off, their ranks uncounted in the national unemployment rate, which doesn’t include people on disability.

The decision to apply, in many cases, is a decision to effectively abandon working altogether. For the severely disabled, this choice is, in essence, made for them. But for others, it’s murkier. Aches accumulate. Years pile up. Job prospects diminish.

“What drives people to [apply for] disability is, in many cases, the repeated loss of work and inability to find new employment,” said David Autor, an economist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied rising disability rates. “Many people who are applying would say, ‘Look, I would like to work, but no one would employ me.’ ”

While disability rates for working-age people have increased nationwide since 2004, rural counties have seen the steepest increases overall.

In that position now, Spencer, a slight man with luminous blue eyes, drove deeper into western Alabama. He steered through Walker County, where nearly one in five working-age adults are on disability, and into Lamar County, where the disability rate has more than doubled over the past 20 years, arriving in the town of Beaverton, population 273, where even the 55-year-old mayor is drawing a disability check.

He pulled up to a small house alongside a quiet country road, got out and looked around. There was only forest and hills and sun. 

“Man, I love it out here,” he said.

“Ain’t going nowhere,” Ruby agreed.

Spencer, who wears mud-caked boots and camouflage and brags of burning trash “like a proper redneck,” has grown so enamored of rural life that he’s sometimes surprised when he remembers that he spent most of his life elsewhere. He grew up just outside of Peoria, Ill., dropped out of school at 14, secured his GED, served two stints in prison for felony burglary before he turned 20 and started working roofing jobs, following other family members into manual labor, like his grandfather who built bridges, and his mother, who worked at a stove factory.

His work as a roofer had been a constant thread through his life, from one state to the next, one job to another. And so it had been again in 2005 when he followed family members to Lamar County, which is 86 percent white and 11 percent black, and was then navigating a long decline in population and manufacturing jobs — one plant moved to Mexico, another to the Dominican Republic. He nonetheless found a roofing job quickly, settling into a life that, for a time, felt as safe as it was comfortable. But then came the recession, and the uneven recovery, and jobs started drying up, and four years ago, as the county poverty rate climbed to 24 percent, the roofing company let him go.

He figured he’d find more work right away. But weeks became months, and he started doing what he calls “odds and ends” — work as a welder, a ranch hand, even a full-time garbage collector — but nothing restored the stability that had gone missing.

He opened the front door to his house. He walked past a small sign in a living room cabinet that said, “BELIEVE in the beauty of your dreams,” and into a bathroom that he had recently remodeled and where another sign said, “DON’T QUIT: Stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit; it’s when things seem worst that you must not quit.”

He had been reading a book lately about the power of positivity. He would sometimes think about it when putting in job applications, or when he was behind his house, looking at his possessions. There was the old Kia that hadn’t run in two years. The pile of aluminum cans for which he’d make 40 cents on the pound. The dozens of used tires a repair shop had paid him to haul away. He never knew what would turn out to be worth something.

He was blessed, he always tried to remind himself.  

But increasingly there were days when Spencer knew he was faking a belief, once so strong, that everything would work out. There were days like today, when he sat in a pew in a small church in Lamar County, listening to members of the congregation ask for prayers for health issues:

“My mother-in-law is in the hospital this week, and she has some heart problems,” a man said.

“My body is not cooperating with my job whatsoever,” a woman said.
“I got my back surgery,” another man said. “I hope it takes this time.”

An hour later, Spencer was home again. His knee was hurting once more, as it had on and off ever since he fell from a roof during a construction job two years ago. He’d never had it checked out because he’d never had insurance, and he didn’t mention it now because everyone at the house seemed worse off than he was. His mother, Karen Ruby, 60, who has cirrhosis of the liver, was sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, saying, “I don’t know when I’m going to be able to get back into church.” His stepfather was stooped beside her, next to a wheelchair, smoking a cigarette. His girlfriend, Tasha Harris, 34, a thin, ashen woman whose back was often thrown out, was upstairs in the dark after leaving church early because she hadn’t felt well.

“I need angel food cake,” his mother told him before he headed out to the store. “Write it down.”
“Angel food cake? All right, I’ll be back,” he said, walking toward the door.
“I feel like crap,” said Harris, who had come downstairs to see him off.
“I’m sorry,” Spencer quietly told her, then went outside to his truck and pulled onto the road.

This is how Spencer spends most of his days, ferrying to the dollar store and back, collecting soda, cigarettes and whatever else his family may want, and consoling them when he’s around. Most days he doesn’t mind. He likes feeling like the strong one when it seems as though almost everyone he knows is either applying for or already on disability. Just the night before, during a family dinner, it had struck him again.

“She walks, and it breaks her bones,” his cousin, who applied for disability after a nervous breakdown, had said of another relative receiving disability.

“She falls a lot,” added his aunt, who collects $733 monthly in disability checks because of back pain.

Spencer, listening to the conversation, had looked around. At the table was another cousin, who has bipolar disorder and receives $701 per month. Beside her was her boyfriend, whose mom had applied for disability, too. Spencer glanced at the ceiling and sighed.

“The whole world is on disability,” he said.

“It’s a tough world,” someone else said.

And now that world was spread out before him as he drove through downtown Beaverton, past a value store, a post office that closes at noon, a bank that shuttered during the recession, a gas station that hasn’t been open for as long as Spencer has been here.

He saw a large roadside banner that said, “APPLY NOW IMMEDIATE OPENINGS,” and cursed to himself. He didn’t know how many times he’d gone in that upholstery factory and asked about a job, any job, and was turned away. He saw another factory, this one an equipment supplier, where he thought he’d need an act of Congress to get hired. Up ahead was a horse-trailer shop. Three consecutive months he had gone through the door, and each time they’d said, “Next month, try us.” Meanwhile, he tried to sign up for a welding class at a community college, but failed the enrollment math exam.

He pulled up to the Piggly-Wiggly. He collected cake mix and three 12-packs of Mountain Dew for Harris, who he knows can go through 24 cans in a day, and was driving home, passing everywhere he couldn’t get a job, when he thought of another opportunity. There was still that place that might need help with welding, a skill he’d picked up after he lost his roofing job. He had told himself he’d go first thing on Monday morning. Arrive by 8:30 a.m. Show the enthusiasm and dedication of someone worth hiring.

Walking back into his house, he placed the cake mix on the counter and heard his mother, who was in her room, with the curtains drawn and the television on, holding an unlit cigarette.

“Desmond?” she said, her voice raspy from a case of strep throat. “Is that black lighter in there?”
“Black lighter?” he said.
“I got a sore throat,” she said.
“I don’t see it,” he said of the lighter.

“Me and Gene, neither of us got a lighter now,” she said.

He began placing empty soda cans into a plastic bin and clearing the kitchen table of the dishes from the night before, then heard Harris at the bottom of the steps.

“Baby?” she said. “My head is still killing me.”

“I got you something for your headache,” he said, handing her some medicine and a 12-pack of Mountain Dew, and went back to the kitchen.

“Desmond,” Harris softly called after him.

“Yeah?” he said, returning.

“Do you have a cigarette?”

He gave her one, finished with the kitchen, then limped to the living room. He lowered himself onto the couch, his knee hurting worse than earlier, and flipped on the television.

Something had to change. Everyone in his life has been telling him what that something is.

You’re hurting more and more, his mother said. And not getting any younger.

There aren’t jobs for you here, a friend said. Think that’ll change anytime soon?

We all need help now and again, his girlfriend said. Don’t be ashamed of being on disability.

You’re a grown man, his stepfather said. Bring in some money.

That was what Spencer was thinking about — money, and not having any — when one day Harris found him sitting alone on the back porch in the quiet, going through another cigarette. “Checks are in,” she said of his parents’ monthly disability payments, which are cumulatively worth $3,616 and support everyone in a house that, at that moment, was low on just about everything.

“We’re going to the store,” Harris said.

“How you getting there?” he asked.

“The truck.”

“It ain’t got no gas, though.”

“I got to take your mom to the bank.”

“Maybe she’ll loan you 10 for gas.”

Harris disappeared back into the house, and Spencer went back to his cigarettes and thoughts. It didn’t seem right to him, living off his parents’ disability checks and borrowing money from them. But he felt trapped. He couldn’t leave Lamar County with his mother so sick. And the only money he had coming in was the monthly $425 an elderly friend paid him to tend his horses and keep him company on lonely afternoons, and it was never enough to cover everything. This month it was socks. Harris needed socks. And what kind of man can’t afford socks? His grandfather used to tell him that a man isn’t a man unless he owns land, and now here he was, years later, not feeling like one at all. He found Harris in the kitchen. “Ask him for $40,” she told Harris said to him. “And I’ll get 10 more from him to buy socks.”

Gene Ruby was at the computer when Spencer approached him. The question came quickly and quietly. “Could I borrow 40? And give it back to you right here soon?” he asked. “I promise.”

A few hours after pocketing the money, Spencer climbed back into the truck Gene made the payments on and started it with the gas Karen had paid for. Harris got in beside him. They had been together for seven years and rarely disagreed, except for that day two years before when Harris said she was thinking of applying for disability on account of back pain. He told her not to do it. People would look down on them. They would find jobs. Don’t lose hope.

A light blinked on the dashboard.

“Transmission’s hot,” Harris said. “I told you it did that to me the other day.”

He pressed down on the accelerator.

“No, don’t do that,” she said. “Just put it in neutral and coast. Try not to mash the gas at all.”

“We’re running it into the ground, is what we’re doing,” he said, lighting another cigarette.

Harris looked at him. She could tell he was getting frustrated. Just about everything these days made him that way. He had begun complaining more, not just about the truck or the pain in his knees and hands, but about all of Lamar County. He told her there would never be jobs here for them. Maybe she had been right about applying for disability. His injuries weren’t getting better, and he wasn’t getting hired, and how much longer could he ask for help with groceries? Help with gas? Help with transportation? Help with everything?

 

He moved the truck out of neutral and back into drive. The store was 20 miles up the road in Hamilton, the largest town in the area, with a population of 6,814. Harris’s brother and his wife lived on its outskirts, and in the falling light, they went to visit, pulling up to a tidy mobile home set beside a large field. Harris’s sister-in-law, Chastity, who was working full time at a calling center, came outside. Then followed Harris’s brother, Josh, 28, broad-shouldered and shirtless. They handed a plate of barbecue pork to Spencer and Harris, both of whom had skipped lunch that day. The plate went back and forth between them.

“I just went and got a job at Wrangler,” Josh said of a distribution center in nearby Hackleburg.

Spencer stopped eating. He looked up.

“Is that right, man?” Spencer asked, and Josh nodded. “That’s great. I’m proud of you. Man, I’m happy about that. I’m happy you got that.”

“Me, too,” Josh said. “It pays good.”

“Monday, I’m going to go back to that shop where . . . I heard they need help,” Spencer said. “Hopefully, I can weasel my way in there.”

“You can,” Josh said. “Put it in your mind, and you can do it.”

“I had an inspiration book,” Spencer said. “You wake up and put it in your head: ‘God’s got my back. I got this job.’ ”

There was a moment of quiet.

“I’m glad you got that, man,” Spencer said again. “I’m proud of you.”

“Sometimes, it’s just the right place at the right time.”

Spencer and Harris finished the barbecue, hugged their relatives goodbye and got back into the truck. He drove to a strip mall that had a Shoppers Value Foods, a Check Into Cash and a title loan shop. He glanced at a sign outside a Sonic fast-food restaurant: “Now Hiring All Shifts.” He sometimes considered applying for a fast-food job. But how, after making $20 an hour at some jobs, could he take one paying $7.25?  He parked and went inside the grocery store.

Spencer was looking at a piece of paper on the coffee table. It was the number to the Social Security office his mother had given him. He and Harris sat on the couch in the living room, and she handed him a telephone.

“You got to call,” she said.

“I’m nervous,” he said.

“Don’t be nervous,” she said. “They’re not going to reach through the phone and get you.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, just held the phone.

“What do I do and say?” he asked.

“Call that number and do whatever they tell you to do.”

He took in a breath and exhaled slowly.

“I guess I’ll call,” he said, punching in the number, and then came a voice on the other end, with that question again, the one he rarely had the courage to ask himself:

“Are you disabled?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“How long have you been disabled?”

“Two years.”

“How are you supporting yourself?”

“Living off my mom.”

“Is this a permanent disability?”

“Uhh,” he began. “I don’t think . . . ”

He looked at the floor and leaned forward.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Yeah, I don’t think it’s getting no better.”

He scheduled an appointment for an interview at the local Social Security office the following month. He hung up, stood and, appearing dazed, told Harris, “I didn’t like it at all.” She gave him a sympathetic look and left him alone on the couch.

He was there again four days later on a Monday morning.

The entire house was dark. Spencer was in his pajamas, watching television. Harris was soon beside him, also in pajamas. “I think I’m getting sick,” she said, and he didn’t answer. She went to another room and came back with Ruby’s laptop, which she uses every Monday morning to look at job listings.

“I ain’t checked it in a week,” she said.

“Oh my God,” he sighed, flipping through channels.

“Do you know anything about pop-ups?” she asked, looking at the computer. “Man, I’ve had, like, a hundred pop-ups.”

“Look, the new ‘Walking Dead,’ ” Spencer said, coming to another channel.

She pulled up her email and clicked on one that listed service positions within 25 miles. “Okay,” she said. “Here we go.” She saw three postings: “Customer Service/Telecommute,” “Telecommute Consultant” and “Product Tester.” She didn’t investigate any of them, instead going back to her inbox. She found another email with more listings.

“Erber?” she asked. “We don’t even have an Erber place around here.”

“Uber,” Spencer said.

“Uber, Erber, whatever,” she said, closing the computer.

An hour passed, then another, and Spencer stayed on the couch. He would not apply for the welding job today. He wanted to focus on securing disability.

“I got to go get dressed,” he said, looking down at his clothing. “What a loser.”

He returned in torn jeans and, with nothing better to do, went outside. He limped to the truck and fiddled with jumper cables. He set a fire inside an iron bin and burned some trash. He inspected a sheet of aluminum he had found, wondering how much he could sell it for. He walked into the woods and walked out. He looked at the road. A car hadn’t passed in a long while. It was 1 in the afternoon. The day already felt over.

BLOGGER'S NOTE:

And the real crime is that the Wall Street THIEVES who brought all of this down on the entire country, are still walking free.

He’s baaaack!’: Trump’s visits to Mar-a-Lago are stretching Palm Beach’s budget and locals’ patience

By Abby Phillip and Lori Rozsa March 20 at 6:00 AM

PALM BEACH, Fla. — It is high season in South Florida: blue skies, low humidity, warm temperatures and increasingly regular visits from the president of the United States.
With those visits, the busiest time of year for residents of Palm Beach has taken on a new unpleasantness. Airplane noise, traffic, and a rash of angry confrontations between pro- and anti-Trump demonstrators are beginning to seem like the new normal.

“He’s baaaack!” one resident warned on a neighborhood blog. “Get out your earplugs it is going to be another noisy weekend!”

President Trump’s trips here — which have added up to more than half of the weekends since his inauguration — are also forcing a brewing budgetary crisis for Palm Beach County, which faces the prospect of millions of dollars in unexpected costs associated with helping to secure the president’s luxury estate.

“I’m not sure that anyone understood that when the president referred to Mar-a-Lago as the ‘southern White House,’ he really intended to visit almost every week,” said Rep. Theodore E. Deutch (D-Fla.), who represents Palm Beach and is pushing for federal appropriators to address the growing costs. “There are a lot of people who come to Palm Beach County over the entire winter to enjoy the weather and enjoy the golfing.

“When the president chooses to do the same thing, it raises a whole host of other issues,” he added. County officials are warning about the ballooning costs associated with paying time and a half to sheriff’s deputies to secure the president’s exclusive members-only club — a price tag that is already more than $1.5 million — and county commissioners are pleading with federal officials to step in and relieve the financial burden. 

“I would never consider a proposal that says we’re not going to use our county resources when the president’s here. It’s our patriotic duty,” said County Commissioner David Kerner. “It’s just unfair that burden should be borne alone.”

Kerner has proposed one solution: levying a “special benefit” fee on Mar-a-Lago to recoup some of the cost. The alternative, according to Kerner, is raising taxes for everyone or making cuts to the budget.

Doing that could imperil proposals to allocate more county money to combat opioid abuse and to hire more sheriff’s deputies next year.

“Those are real issues: keeping cops off the street and diminishing our opioid epidemic response,” Kerner said.

Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, who has known Trump for 25 years, met privately with the president in February at Mar-a-Lago.

 "I told him we were incurring these expenses, and he said, ‘I’m going to take care of law enforcement,’ ” Bradshaw said. “We were having a conversation, and he said, ‘I’m a big supporter of law enforcement; you guys are doing a good job down here with the Secret Service, and I don’t expect that you guys are doing it for free.’ So he gets it; he knows what’s happening.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on whether the president thinks the county should be reimbursed for the cost of assisting in his security.

Once just another celebrity living on what locals call “millionaires’ row,” Trump is now the leader of the free world, and along with straining the county’s budget, his presence has upended some of the carefree peace of his winter enclave.

A local airport faces “devastation,” officials say, as a result of flight restrictions. Residents in neighborhoods nearby complain about the constant rumbling of commercial flights redirected over their homes.

“They’ll start with the planes going over at 5:30 a.m.,” said Carol Canright, a West Palm Beach resident. “You have to turn up the volume to hear over it.”

Local real estate agent Linda Cullen said flights take off over her house every three minutes when Trump is in town.

“You would think that he would be open to some way of softening the impact,” she said.
Meanwhile, a 15-minute drive from Mar-a-Lago, the president’s presence has all but shut down the small local airport. On a South Florida weekend like this past one, with clear skies, sunshine and a slight breeze, activity around the Lantana Airport should be at its busiest.

“It’s a perfect day,” said Altaf Hussain, owner of Pilot Training Center, a flight school based at the airport. “This place should be buzzing.”

It’s one of the nation’s busiest general-aviation airports for flight training, and winter weekends are the prime time for students to practice their skills in the air. These weekends are also popular with tourists renting flights to cruise above the nearby beaches, and for banner planes taking off with advertisements unfurling from their tails. More than two dozen businesses employing 400 people operate out of the airport.

Instead of overseeing flights, Hussain sat outside his hangar Saturday, his five Cessna 172 fixed-wing planes parked nearby, grounded for the weekend by a “temporary flight restriction” order from the Secret Service — the highest level of restrictions aimed at pilots, used whenever the president is in town.

For the first time Saturday, Hussain and other business owners at Lantana were told by the Secret Service that not only were they prohibited from flying, they couldn’t even start their engines for regular maintenance. So Hussain spent his morning putting together a barbecue grill.

“The weekend flights are 33 percent of my business,” he said. “I’m surviving, but I don’t know how much longer. I lose $8,500 a weekend when we’re shut down. For a small guy like me, that’s a lot of money.”

Jonathan Miller, who operates the airport, told the Associated Press last month that a helicopter company has decided to move elsewhere, costing Lantana $440,000 in annual rent and fuel sales.
“It’s a ghost town,” Ryan Dougherty said as he worked on a plane at a Lantana hangar. Dougherty works at Florida Aero Paint, painting helicopters and other aircraft. “We can’t even get UPS deliveries. Every time this happens, it sets us back four days. Customers don’t want to wait that long.”

Local and federal officials met recently for more than two hours with the Secret Service, which explained that the airport’s proximity to Mar-a-Lago meant that making special accommodations for Lantana was impossible.

The situation could be a one-two financial punch for the county as well, which owns the airport but leases it to tenant businesses. Since the start of the year, the county’s profits from operating Lantana have grown smaller and smaller, according to Kerner, the county commissioner. And officials may be forced to aid the small businesses hit hardest by the flight restrictions.

“It’s just devastation,” Kerner said. “I’m going to have to fight for those businesses in the county budget, and maybe rent rebates or some sort of subsidy that way.”

Recently, residents have noticed a military-grade radar parked in an open lot on the airport’s grounds, one more sign of the permanence of their new normal.

“There’s federal infrastructure coming in,” Kerner commented.
If there is a silver lining, it is that Trump’s visits could boost an already thriving tourism industry in Palm Beach.

Visits to Palm Beach County were up to record levels before Trump took office — 7.35 million visitors for 2016, above 6.9 million the year before, according to Ashley Svarney, director of public relations and communications for Discover the Palm Beaches, the local tourism promotion agency.
“So far this year, the numbers are pretty good, but it’s too early to tell,” she said.

But having the media covering Trump at his beachside estate during the height of the tourist season has its benefits, she said.

“When people see the photos and video of the crystal-clear blue skies, the turquoise waters, the beautiful homes, it may make them think more about visiting,” Svarney said.

Some of the visitors to the area around Mar-a-Lago are arriving less to enjoy the beautiful scenery than to take part in the intense political debate ushered in by Trump’s election.

West Palm Beach resident Christy Cary planted herself on the thin stretch of beach lining a narrow two-lane road a few hundred feet from Mar-a-Lago on a recent Saturday morning. She took a last puff of her cigarette and stared out over the water as a heavily armed Coast Guard boat floated by.

“I just think it’s such a beautiful, lovely place; I come down here and spread some support,” said Cary, who that day donned her “I’m an adorable deplorable: Trump 2016” T-shirt.
Cary and several friends, all Trump supporters, have made a habit of coming to the beach to counter anti-Trump protesters who also tend to gather here when the president is in town.

“We’re all down here being peaceful all day until they come, and then it starts,” Cary said of the protesters. Her friend Jennifer, a vocal Trump supporter, is the one who engages, Cary said.

 She’ll stay down here until everyone’s gone, [that] type of girl,” Cary said. “That’s why we always drive separate.”
Cary has less patience with the protesters.

“I don’t like being cussed at,” she added.
Sunday afternoon, her efforts paid off. As Trump’s motorcade passed Cary and her friends waving and cheering, the president waved back and later summoned them to meet him at Mar-a-Lago.

“I’m like, what am I supposed to say to the president?” Cary said, dazed, after the meeting. “It still doesn’t even really feel real.”

Sheriff Rick Bradshaw, do you REALLY think he gives a damn about Palm Beach County?

 

So far, Trump has been mercifully incompetent

 

“The world is laughing at us. They’re laughing at the stupidity of our president.”

— Donald Trump, October 2016

 During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump remarked often on the stupidity of our leaders. He was under the impression that the rest of the planet was indulging in some sort of global guffaw at our expense. “How stupid are we? The world is laughing.” If so, what must the mirthful world think of our current state of affairs? 

This past week alone: 

 

-The House and Senate intelligence committees said they saw no evidence for President Trump’s wild claim that President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower, and Britain protested that the White House falsely alleged that British intelligence was involved. White House press secretary Sean Spicer has been arguing that Trump didn’t mean wiretapping when he said Obama had Trump’s “wires tapped.” Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway suggested that eavesdropping could have been accomplished using microwave ovens. 

-Trump’s fellow Republicans pronounced his budget dead on arrival in Congress — “draconian, careless and counterproductive” were the words used by Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), former House Appropriations Committee chairman — because it recklessly cuts (slashing the State Department by nearly a third and targeting Meals on Wheels for the elderly) yet still adds to the debt Trump promised to eliminate.

-Legislation to replace Obamacare stalled in Congress and had to be rewritten because of a rebellion within Trump’s own party.

-A judge halted Trump’s second attempt at a ban on travel from several Muslim countries.

And Republican lawmakers probing Trump’s ties to Russia threatened subpoenas over the executive branch’s stonewalling.

In one of the presidential debates, CNBC’s John Harwood asked Trump if he was running “a comic book version of a presidential campaign.” Now Trump seems to be running a cartoon version of a presidency, and he’s Elmer Fudd. His proposals could, if successfully implemented, be ruinous. But so far, at least, Trump has been mercifully incompetent.

He and the GOP-controlled Congress have been on the job two months, but he has signed only nine bills into law, none major. The only law so far this month: a bill naming the Veterans Affairs facility in Butler County, Pa. A McClatchy-Marist poll last month found that a 58 percent majority of Americans reported being “embarrassed” by Trump. 

For good reason:

Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, lasted just 24 days on the job after misrepresenting his contacts with Russia. Attorney General Jeff Sessions falsely testified that he’d had no contacts with the Russians, forcing his recusal from Russia investigations once the truth came out.

Trump’s nominee to be labor secretary withdrew in the face of broad opposition. His education secretary, who suggested that schools need guns to defend against grizzlies, was confirmed only when the vice president broke a tie vote. 

Trump blamed a “so-called” judge for striking down his first travel ban and proposed blaming the court system if there was a terrorist attack; his own Supreme Court nominee called such remarks disheartening.

Trump conducted sensitive diplomacy over a North Korean missile launch with the Japanese prime minister surrounded by diners at his Mar-a-Lago country club, one of whom posted online a photo of the man carrying the nuclear football.

Trump, after inflating the crowd size at his inauguration and embracing a conspiracy theory that 3 million to 5 million Americans voted illegally, falsely accused the media of not covering terrorist attacks. The White House then produced a badly spelled list of attacks, most of which had been covered. Conway invented one attack, the “Bowling Green massacre.”

(Kellyann) Conway pitched Ivanka Trump’s fashion line on Fox News. Taxpayers have subsidized millions of dollars’ worth of expenses related to Mar-a-Lago and the Trump sons’ foreign travel.

Trump marked Black History Month with remarks suggesting he thought abolitionist Frederick Douglass was still alive.

Trump opened a rift with Australia in an angry phone call with that ally’s prime minister. 

He provoked the Mexican president to cancel a trip to Washington, 

and he baffled the Swedes by alluding to fictitious refugee-related violence “last night in Sweden.” Britain postponed a visit from Trump in hopes that anti-Trump protests would cool.

 

Trump’s closest aides have leaked several accounts of him raging about the White House. His team is frequently caught off guard by his Twitter attacks, which have included shots at Arnold Schwarzenegger and Nordstrom and misinformation Trump heard on Fox News.

This tragicomedy adds irony when you consider that the main character is the same one who campaigned by saying “they laugh at our stupidity” and “we are led by very, very stupid people” and “I have the best words, but there’s no better word than ‘stupid.’ ”

Now the world has reason to laugh at us — because we’re with stupid.

Yes, Trump Is Being Held Accountable

By JACK GOLDSMITHMARCH 15, 2017

Credit Tim Peacock

Many critics of President Trump, including a sizable number of Democrats in the Republican-controlled Congress, are wary about the incipient congressional investigations of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and the possibly related Russian entanglements with the Trump administration and campaign. They suspect that an independent investigation from outside the government is the only hope for checking a president who seems oblivious to press criticism, whose party controls Congress and who has the executive branch under his thumb.

These worries are understandable but misplaced. There might be a time when an independent investigation becomes necessary, but we are not nearly there yet. For now, our constitutional system is working well to ferret out the truth and to hold Mr. Trump and his subordinates accountable.

The most important checks on the Trump presidency come from inside it. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is reportedly conducting at least three investigations related to Russia, the election and the administration. Whatever one thinks about his pre-election maneuvers, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey (a former colleague of mine at the Justice Department), has proved to be an independent actor, and he has every interest in pursuing the cases wherever they lead.

Mr. Trump could fire Mr. Comey on a whim, but that would not kill the F.B.I. investigation. Rather, just as President Richard Nixon hastened his impeachment with the Watergate-related firings known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” canning Mr. Comey would only heighten the public’s and Congress’s suspicions about Mr. Trump’s guilt and increase pressure on the F.B.I. and others to get to the bottom of the Russia matter.

Many worry that even if the F.B.I. were to conduct an investigation that warranted criminal proceedings, the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, a close ally of the president, would squelch them. But after examining the department’s rules and consulting its ethics experts, Mr. Sessions has recused himself “from any existing or future investigations of any matter relating in any way to the campaigns for president of the United States.” Those investigations will now be supervised by Rod J. Rosenstein, soon to be the deputy attorney general, who is a career prosecutor of undoubted independence and an expert on national security and public corruption.

Another reason to think the existing process is working to keep the president in check are the plentiful leaks from the executive branch that have revealed a great deal about the Russian imbroglio. Leaks of this sort are a predicable response to a perception of illegitimacy or overreach inside the executive branch. It is hard to know at this point which leaks are justified and which are illegitimate. But overall they function as a significant constraint on this presidency.

The leaks have also shown the strength of the press, belying worries that journalists would be chilled by President Barack Obama’s crackdown on leaks and Mr. Trump’s unusual attacks on the news media. The Fourth Estate is covering the Trump presidency with unusual critical vigor, reporting concrete and damning details as if it had a seat inside the Oval Office.

Finally, there are the investigations by Congress. Prominent Republicans such as Senator John McCain of Arizona and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have questioned the president’s honesty on the Russia matter. The Senate Intelligence Committee is conducting an “independent review” and has already been briefed by Mr. Comey. The House Intelligence Committee will begin hearings next week. A subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee is also investigating the matter and has pledged “to ensure that the F.B.I.’s work is free of all political influence.”

While there is no doubt that partisan politics will inform what many in both congressional parties do in this matter, one should not overlook what is truly remarkable here: In the second month of a new presidency, several bodies in a Congress controlled by the president’s party are conducting high-profile, politically fraught and hard-to-control investigations that potentially implicate current and former administration officials and former campaign officials.

All of these actors and institutions are holding the Trump presidency to account. They are endeavoring to uncover the truth about the manifold Russian mysteries. And they can, if they see fit, take action with effects ranging from publicity and embarrassment to political damage with electoral consequences to criminal prosecution to impeachment if appropriate.

It’s true that the process of accountability is halting and frustratingly slow. But this is as it should be. The stakes could not be higher for our democracy. Ascertaining the truth is vital, and respect for the innocent is as important as identification of wrongdoing. It is thus crucial that the complex and elusive facts be sorted out in a fair and procedurally rigorous manner, and that the law be applied with deliberation and good judgment.  Justice seems elusive here because it is so plodding. But plodding justice is our best chance for a legitimate resolution to this mess.

Jack Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration, is a professor at Harvard Law School and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free

I wish I knew how

It would feel to be free

I wish I could break

All the chains holding me

I wish I could say

All the things that I should say

Say 'em loud say 'em clear

For the whole round world to hear

I wish I could share

All the love that's in my heart

Remove all the bars

That keep us apart

I wish you could know

What it means to be me

Then you'd see and agree

That every man should be free

I wish I could give

All I'm longin' to give

I wish I could live

Like I'm longin' to live

I wish I could do

All the things that I can do

Though I'm way overdue

I'd be starting anew.

Well I wish I could be like a bird in the sky

How sweet it would be

If I found I could fly

I'd soar to the sun

And look down at the sea

And I sing 'cause I know

How it feels to be free

by Billy Taylor for Nina Simone