It Wouldn’t Be Hard to End Poverty in America

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If we were willing to share the wealth. From Jacobin Magazine:

The poor in our nation are often blamed for their own crises, with lawmakers and even service providers citing bad behavior or ignorance as the cause of individual poverty.

In Broke in America, Joanne Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox reject that narrative. US policies that benefit the wealthy cause poverty, they insist — and changes to those policies can end it.

Fran Quigley interviewed Goldblum and Shaddox for Jacobin.

FQ

Almost immediately in this book, you confront the maxim, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime”: “Antipoverty efforts should stop making assumptions about people’s fishing abilities,” you write. “It’s past time to stop judging and give that hungry person a fish.” Why did you take that on?

CS

That saying summarizes everything that’s wrong with how the United States addresses poverty: we say the problem is the person, so we need to fix the person and what that person lacks in skills. But does he even have a fishing pole? Is he too weak with hunger to go fish? Is the “he” in question actually a woman, and women aren’t allowed to fish there?

It’s so paternalistic and so horrible. Yet people say it all the time, like they’ve said something wise and caring.

JG

At the policy level, we create systems that actually make it harder for people to be self-sufficient.

For example, many people who are part of the TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) or workforce development programs are trained to become certified nursing assistants, CNAs. That’s a very important job that we need to do. But it is a poverty-wage job. By and large, people who work in those positions don’t have workplace benefits and are not paid a living wage. But the government trains someone to be a CNA and then it can feel like it’s done something because it’s gotten that person off of the rolls.

FQ

You devote a good deal of the book to reviewing the data and the stories that describe US poverty, but you always circle back to solutions, refuting the idea we often hear that “the poor will always be with us.” Why do you think we can, as your subtitle promises, end poverty in the United States?

JG

Because poverty is simply not having enough money to meet your needs. There is nothing more complicated about it than that. And we live in the richest nation in the world, where there is plenty of money. So if we have the political will, we could end poverty.

There are lots of different ways to do it. A living wage is necessary . . . We talk in the book about universal health care, housing supports, about making water and electricity and heat a public good. Other countries do all this, and there is no reason we could not do so as well. If we just tax people appropriately, we can have the money to do all this.

CS

We write about challenges in affording car insurance in places where you need a car to get to work, the difficulty in keeping the lights on, not being able to afford medicines. Being in poverty is like walking across a rotted floor — there are so many ways you can fall through. And it all comes down to money.

[There] is a lot of money that’s churning around in our economy, but it’s not being shared appropriately. And by “shared,” I don’t mean some generous act. I mean that the worker in the warehouse who is making everything run deserves a fair share of the revenue he is generating. We don’t have that now.

FQ

You both have worked with poor people in the United States for a long time. But you write that it took a while for you to come to your own realizations that our approach to confronting poverty is fundamentally flawed.

JG

I was a social worker doing direct service with chronically homeless families. When they did have homes, they often did not have heat and hot water. One mom who I worked with never had toilet paper and often did not have clean diapers. . . . It turned out there was no choice involved: there was nothing more than the fact that she couldn’t afford these basic necessities. . . .

CS

At the soup kitchen where I worked, you would always have people after the meal asking, “Do you have 75 cents for the bus?” I used to think, gosh, we should teach them planning skills, how to think more long-term. Because they knew when they came to the soup kitchen, they had to get back home. Later on, I realized: they were hungry, and they got 75 cents somehow to come to the soup kitchen to eat in the first place. That was the wise survival strategy.

So often we make judgments about poor people’s motivation and cognition that are really a reflection of not having resources. I do a lot of work in the criminal legal system, and motivation is a big deal. Do they show up for their appointments? Do they return phone calls?

Well, to show up for an appointment, you need transportation and childcare. To return phone calls, you need a working phone. The written notices may be written in a language they don’t speak. And on and on. It’s very much like that woman who didn’t have toilet paper: she didn’t need a lecture on being a better parent; she needed toilet paper. And the guys at the soup kitchen that I was making judgments about — they needed 75 cents for the bus.

FQ

You have your own experiences addressing poverty, you spoke with experts, and you did your own policy research. Why did you consider it important to include in the book the stories of people living in poverty?

JG

These stories matter. There is a certain symbolic annihilation of people in poverty in this country. You watch a situation comedy, and everybody lives in a house with a glittering kitchen with granite countertops. We don’t represent poor people in the world in either nonfiction or fiction terribly much. And when we do, we often reduce them to stereotypes. Colleen really insisted that we interview people from all over the country, to make it clear that poverty exists everywhere in the United States, and that it is not one community, one group, one area, one city. You can go anywhere and find people who are experiencing these issues.

FQ

As frontline service providers who have dealt with these practical problems of poverty, why did you include chapters on racism, sexism, and denial of political power?

CS

When you look at any indicator of poverty — who doesn’t have water in their house, who has food insecurity, who dies sooner — you see that race matters. And you can say the same for gender. Women are more likely to be in poverty, more likely to be in extreme poverty. It’s not just that the world is unfair to poor people. It’s doubly unfair when you belong to another oppressed group. There were some communities that are not just left behind, but consciously excluded from prosperity.

JG

That means that part of ending poverty is taking down structures that block access to the political process, educational opportunities, and on and on. For example, we write in the book about redlining and racism in housing policy at all levels. Colleen and I were very intentional about saying these things out loud and clearly, so people cannot pretend that racism and other structural inequalities don’t impact the struggles we are talking about.

FQ

You mention other nations’ approaches to basic needs. The United States has a dramatically higher poverty rate than other wealthy nations and dramatically greater levels of income and wealth inequality. What are other countries doing right that we don’t do here?

JG

They establish some sort of floor. There is no floor in the United States — there is no depth of poverty that you can’t fall to. We have made TANF time-limited, we have enacted policies to make SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly Food Stamps] time-limited. You can be literally left out in the cold here.

One of the biggest things that’s different about the United States than most other countries is that you can become bankrupt due to medical debt. Not having guaranteed health care and the likelihood of accumulating debt related to health care is uniquely American and incredibly dangerous. . . .You talk to people around the world, and they just are gobsmacked that we allow this. . . .

FQ

What led you down the path of devoting your professional careers to anti-poverty work?

JG

From the time that I can remember, the work that I felt called to do was being a social worker. My mother was a social worker who focused on reproductive rights, and my father was an attorney who did a lot of pro bono work with the ACLU and other causes. . . .

I grew up in New Jersey and was very lucky to go to Hunter College School of Social Work, which teaches what they refer to as Jane Addams social work: not therapy in an office, but changing systems and working to support people.

CS

Probably the defining moment of my life was when I was a very young child, about five or six. My mom was a waitress who worked incredibly hard to support us all. At night, when her feet were just aching, she would put her feet in a tub of Epsom salts. One night I was sitting on the floor playing next to her and I saw the basin fill up with blood because her calluses and blisters had cracked. And I remember thinking: People don’t know how hard her life is, because if they knew they would help. When I grow up, I’m going to write stories about people like my mom. . . .

FQ

I know Colleen is an active Democratic Socialists of America member, and Joanne describes herself as “a little left of liberal.” How far removed from our current U.S. political reality are your prescriptions for ending poverty?

CS

I am a socialist. But you can have onions in a soup without it being onion soup, right? Many of the policies we’re calling for are things that could be labeled socialist, but they’re going on in other capitalist countries. For example, Japan is a very capitalist country where childcare is free. We have just taken capitalism to a really toxic extreme in the United States.

FQ

There have been a lot of books written on poverty, and certainly a lot of media coverage. Who were you aiming to reach with this book?

JG

We wrote this for people who consider themselves to be progressive and may be sympathetic to the poor. But they also have heard the line that poverty is an individual failing or think that it is unsolvable. It’s not.

Is It a Political “Lord of the Flies”?

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We human beings like explanations for strange phenomena. The way one of our political parties has become incredibly extreme is one of those strange phenomena that cry out for an explanation. I’m sure there is no single, simple reason, but Prof. Paul Krugman gives it a shot:

There have always been people like Dxxxx Txxxx: self-centered, self-aggrandizing, believing that the rules apply only to the little people and that what happens to the little people doesn’t matter.

The modern [Republican Party], however, isn’t like anything we’ve seen before, at least in American history. If there’s anyone who wasn’t already persuaded that one of our two major political parties has become an enemy, not just of democracy, but of truth, events since the election should have ended their doubts.

It’s not just that a majority of House Republicans and many Republican senators are backing Txxxx’s efforts to overturn his election loss, even though there is no evidence of fraud or widespread irregularities. Look at the way David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler are campaigning in the Senate runoffs in Georgia.

They aren’t running on issues, or even on real aspects of their opponents’ personal history. Instead they’re claiming, with no basis in fact, that their opponents are Marxists or “involved in child abuse”. That is, the campaigns to retain Republican control of the Senate are based on lies.

On Sunday Mitt Romney excoriated Ted Cruz and other congressional Republicans’ attempts to undo the presidential election, asking, “Has ambition so eclipsed principle?” But what principle does Romney think the [Grand Old Party] has stood for in recent years? It’s hard to see anything underlying recent Republican behavior beyond the pursuit of power by any means available.

So how did we get here? What happened to the Republican Party?

It didn’t start with Txxxx. On the contrary, the party’s degradation has been obvious, for those willing to see it, for many years.

Way back in 2003 I wrote that Republicans had become a radical force hostile to America as it is, potentially aiming for a one-party state in which “elections are only a formality.” In 2012 Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein warned that the G.O.P. was “unmoved by conventional understanding of facts” and “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition”.

If you’re surprised by the eagerness of many in the party to overturn an election based on specious claims of fraud, you weren’t paying attention.

But what is driving the Republican descent into darkness?

Is it a populist backlash against elites? It’s true that there’s resentment over a changing economy that has boosted highly educated metropolitan areas at the expense of rural and small-town America; Txxxx received 46 percent of the vote, but the counties he won represented only 29 percent of America’s economic output. There’s also a lot of white backlash over the nation’s growing racial diversity.

The past two months have, however, been an object lesson in the extent to which “grass roots” anger is actually being orchestrated from the top. If a large part of the Republican base believes, groundlessly, that the election was stolen, it’s because that’s what leading figures in the party have been saying. Now politicians are citing widespread skepticism about the election results as a reason to reject the outcome — but they themselves conjured that skepticism out of thin air.

And what’s striking if you look into the background of the politicians stoking resentment against elites is how privileged many of them are. Josh Hawley, the first senator to declare that he would object to certification of the election results, rails against elites but is himself a graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School. Cruz, now leading the effort, has degrees from Princeton and Harvard.

. . . These aren’t people who have been mistreated by the system. So why are they so eager to bring the system down?

I don’t think it’s just cynical calculation, a matter of playing to the base. As I said, the base is in large part taking its cues from the party elite. And the craziness of that elite doesn’t seem to be purely an act.

My best guess is that we’re looking at a party that has gone feral — that has been cut off from the rest of society.

People have compared the modern G.O.P. to organized crime or a cult, but to me, Republicans look more like the lost boys in “Lord of the Flies.” They don’t get news from the outside world, because they get their information from partisan sources that simply don’t report inconvenient facts. They don’t face adult supervision, because in a polarized political environment there are few competitive races.

So they’re increasingly inward-looking, engaged in ever more outlandish efforts to demonstrate their loyalty to the tribe. Their partisanship isn’t about issues, although the party remains committed to cutting taxes on the rich and punishing the poor; it’s about asserting the dominance of the in-group and punishing outsiders.

The big question is how long America as we know it can survive in the face of this malevolent tribalism.

The current attempt to undo the presidential election won’t succeed, but it has gone on far longer and attracted much more support than almost anyone predicted. And unless something happens to break the grip of anti-democratic, anti-truth forces on the G.O.P., one day they will succeed in killing the American experiment.

Unquote.

Krugman offers two explanations: (1) Republicans are living in a closed, right-wing information loop and (2) most Republican politicians never face serious electoral competition from the left — they fear competition from radical Republicans who are even further to the right. Maybe reason (1) is the explanation for reason (2)? It’s only because of the closed information loop that members of the party move further and further to the right.

But why is there this closed information loop? My guess is that Republicans hate the reality of contemporary America so much — uppity women, uppity Blacks, immigrants from Latin America, professional people who tell them uncomfortable truths, a society and a culture that become less traditional every day — that they much prefer news and information that isn’t based in reality. If you can’t stand the reality of the modern world, avoid it as much as possible. People like Rupert Murdoch and Rush Limbaugh (and Mark Zuckerberg) then come along and see how much money they can make propagating a right-wing fantasy world millions prefer to live in. The result is a vicious circle. The fantastic media feeds the masses and the masses demand media that’s ever more fantastic. Down and down the spiral goes and it still hasn’t hit bottom.

Don’t Ever Call Them “Conservative”

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It’s not a new idea, but Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post points out that there’s nothing conservative about today’s radical right (i.e. most of the Gruesome Old Party):

You hear the word “radical” a lot these days. It’s usually aimed like a lethal weapon at Democratic office-seekers, especially those who want to unseat a Republican incumbent. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, the Georgia Republican, rarely utters her challenger’s name without branding him as “radical liberal Raphael Warnock.”

Such is the upside-down world we’ve come to inhabit. These days, the true radicals are the enablers of President Txxxx’s ongoing attempted coup: the media bloviators on Fox News, One America and Newsmax who parrot his lies about election fraud; and the members of Congress who plan to object on Wednesday to what should be a pro forma step of approving the electoral college results, so that President-elect Joe Biden can take office peacefully on Jan. 20.

But instead of being called what they are, these media and political figures get a mild label: conservative.

News outlets that traffic in conspiracy theories? They’re branded as “conservative.”

Politicians who are willing to bring down democracy to appease a cult leader? . . . Just a bloc of “conservatives.”

As the Hill put it in a typical headline Monday: “Cotton breaks with conservative colleagues who will oppose electoral vote.”

In applying this innocuous-sounding description, the reality-based media does the public a terrible disservice. Instead of calling out the truth, it normalizes; it softens the dangerous edges.

It makes it seem, well, not so bad. Conservative, after all, describes politics devoted to free enterprise and traditional ideas.

But that’s simply false. Sean Hannity is not conservative. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama are not conservative. Nor are the other 10 (at last count) senators who plan to object.

“There is nothing conservative about subverting democracy,” wrote Tim Alberta, the author and Politico correspondent. He suggests “far right” as an alternative descriptor.
Not bad. But I’d take it a step further, because it’s important to be precise. I’d call them members of the radical right.

Txxxx knows no limits as he tries to overturn the election.

My high school Latin comes in handy here: “Radical” derives from the concept of pulling something up by the roots, which seems to be exactly what these political and media types seem bent on doing to democratic norms.

The dictionary definition says radical means “advocating extreme measures to retain or restore a political state of affairs.”

Bingo.

Members of the radical right won’t like this, of course. They soak in the word “conservative” like a warm bath. Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan — extreme even among the extremists — leans heavily on the word in his official bio. . .

The language problem here points to a larger, more troubling issue: The radicalism of the right has been normalized. It’s been going on, and building, for decades. Don’t worry, this mind-set reassures, it’s all fine. There are different ways of looking at the world, liberal and conservative, and they are about equal.

That, of course, is misleading hooey.

Heather Cox Richardson, a history professor at Boston College, used a more precise phrase as she recently assessed what has transpired over many decades to culminate in today’s election denialism: This is “the final, logical step of Movement Conservatism: denying the legitimacy of anyone who does not share their ideology. This is unprecedented.” She called it “a profound attack on our democracy” and predicted that it wouldn’t succeed.

“This tent that used to be sort of ‘far-right extremists’ has gotten a lot broader,” Georgetown law professor Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw terrorism cases, told NPR. Now, the line between fringe extremists and mainstream Republican politics and right-leaning media is so blurred as to be almost meaningless.

Too much of the reality-based media has gone along for the ride, worried about accusations of leftist bias, wanting desperately to be seen as neutral, unwilling to be clear about how lopsided these sides are.

On Jan. 20, we can still presume, Txxxx will be gone from the White House. But his enablers and the movement that fostered him, and that he built up, will remain. That’s troubling.

We should take one small but symbolic step toward repairing the damage by using the right words to describe it. It would be a start.

Unquote.

The mayor of Washington D.C. has activated the district’s National Guard in advance of Wednesday’s pro-sedition, Txxxx-encouraged protests: “’We will not allow people to incite violence, intimidate our residents or cause destruction in our city’, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said.”

You don’t need the military to protect life and property from conservatives. You do need it for the radical right. 

One of the Men Who Brought Down Nixon Reacts to the New Tape

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A CNN host spoke to Carl Bernstein, one of the reporters who broke the Watergate story, to get his reaction to today’s news:

CNN:  Carl, is this deja vu for you to hear this kind of audiotape of the president of the United States, the sitting president … ?

Bernstein: It’s not deja vu. This is something far worse than what occurred in Watergate. We have both a criminal president of the United States . . . and a subversive president of the United States at the same time. This one person subverting the very basis of our democracy and willing to act criminally in that subversion. But more important, what we hear on this tape — this is the ultimate smoking gun tape — it is . . . the evidence of what this president is willing to do to undermine the electoral system and illegally, improperly and immorally try to instigate a coup in which he remains the president of the United States. 

And in any other presidency, any other presidency, this tape would be evidence enough to result in the impeachment of the president of the United States, his conviction in the Senate of the United States, and, really, an immediate call by the members of Congress, including the members of his own party, that he resign immediately. That’s really what we ought to be hearing from Republicans at this moment. Mr. President, resign. Leave the White House. This is unconscionable, it is wrong and we of your party will not permit it. We’re not going to hear that. We might from a few Republicans, but that’s what’s really called for here.

And the one thing we should recall from Watergate, it is that the heroes of Watergate were Republicans who would not tolerate Richard Nixon’s conduct.

Now There’s a Tape, Just Like Nixon’s

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The appearance today of a recording in which the president commits criminal offenses —  assuredly not for the first time — moved Jennifer Rubin and Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post to both comment. Below is a mixture of their responses (along with a few italicized comments from me):

When President Txxxx allegedly tried firing special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III, refused to respond to lawful subpoenas during the investigation into the 2016 election and committed the other acts to obstruct justice documented in the Mueller report, he arguably violated his oath, broke the law and committed impeachable conduct.

When he tried to extort [the] Ukrainian President (“I would like you to do us a favor though 
”) to create dirt to use against now President-elect Joe Biden and stonewalled Congress’s demands for evidence, he again violated his oath, engaged in impeachable conduct and broke the law.

In neither case did Republicans recognize the facts before them. In neither case did they act to remove him.

[A president who] began his presidency trying to obstruct justice [is] ending it trying to obstruct democracy, and with an alarmingly large cadre of co-conspirators.

Some of this attempted obstruction is being conducted, as is so often the case with Txxxx, in plain sight; Txxxx’s anti-democratic conduct is so flagrant and so repeated that we become inured to how abnormal and unacceptable it is. Thus he has claimed massive fraud without basis, unleashed a barrage of litigation lacking the facts and the law to back him up, and riled up his believers to subscribe to the mass delusion that the election was stolen from him.

Behind the scenes, things are even worse, with the craziest of Txxxx’s crazy advisers pushing the president to pursue unimaginable possibilities such as declaring martial law or invoking the Insurrection Act to unleash the military to quell violence that he himself has sought to stir up.

That the ten living former secretaries of defense felt compelled to come together in an op-ed decrying any use of the military in an effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power underscores the peril of the moment. These aren’t just Democratic appointees — they are conservatives such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and the two secretaries Txxxx ousted for being insufficiently compliant, James Mattis and Mark ­Esper.

And now . . . we have a chilling glimpse of Txxxx’s delusional private arm-twisting in his frenzy to cling to power.

The Post reports: “President Txxxx urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that election experts said raised legal questions.” In the call, Txxxx asked Raffensperger to change the certified vote that was subject to multiple recounts: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

In fact he threatened him. The Post reports, “During their conversation, Txxxx issued a vague threat to both Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the secretary of state’s general counsel, suggesting that if they don’t find that thousands of ballots in Fulton County have been illegally destroyed to block investigators — an allegation for which there is no evidence — they would be subject to criminal liability.” Txxxx, sounding like a mobster as he often does, said, “That’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.” Nice career, there Brad. Shame if anything happened to it.

Pressuring a campaign official to change the vote is a federal offense [it’s a Georgia offense too]: “A person . . . who in any election for Federal office 
 knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process …” is subject to imprisonment of up to five years.

Threatening Raffensperger with criminal consequences is also arguably extortion: “Whoever, with intent to extort from any person, firm, association, or corporation, any money or other thing of value, transmits . . . any communication containing any threat to injure the property or reputation of the addressee . . . or any threat to accuse the addressee or any other person of a crime, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”

Georgia has counted its votes three times, once by hand, but Txxxx told Raffensperger, “There’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.” He warned that Raffensperger and his chief lawyer were running “a big risk” of criminal liability by failing to find voter fraud.

The man who sparked a special counsel investigation by urging the FBI director to “go easy” on his fired national security adviser, the man who triggered his own impeachment by soliciting a foreign leader to help him dig up dirt on Biden — this man will never learn [or change, as Rep. Adam Schiff memorably argued during the impeachment “trial” a year ago].

Really, why should he? There are never any real consequences.

Which brings us to Txxxx’s co-conspirators.

Vice President Pence . . . is constitutionally obligated to preside over [Wednesday’s] joint session of Congress to certify Biden’s electoral college victory. Pence’s chief of staff . . . issued a statement Saturday night saying that Pence “welcomes” congressional efforts “to raise objections and bring forward evidence” at the session. . . .

And the dozen or more Republican senators . . .who are turning what should be a ceremonial event into a constitutional circus. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, defending his move to object to the certification, could summon only Pennsylvania’s use of mail-in ballots when the state’s constitution “has required all votes to be cast in person, with narrowly defined exceptions.” The state legislature passed a law allowing no-excuse mail-in voting. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, without getting into the merits, threw out a challenge to the law.

“These are very serious irregularities, on a very large scale, in a presidential election,” Hawley intoned. This man calls himself a “constitutional lawyer” and a conservative? In our federal system, what happens in Pennsylvania is up to Pennsylvania. The legislature acted. The court rejected a challenge. The state certified Biden’s win. Hawley proffered not a scintilla of evidence of fraud. What is he arguing — that the votes of more than 2.5 million Pennsylvanians should now be invalidated?

Not to be outdone — or outmaneuvered in the 2024 presidential sweepstakes — Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, joined by 10 colleagues, is pressing for a commission to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election results, again, with no evidence to justify such a last-minute step.

Instead, Cruz, like Hawley, uses the very voter fears that Txxxx so carefully nurtured and his allies have stoked to justify the need for extraordinary intervention. Speaking to Fox News . . . , Cruz cited “unprecedented allegations of voter fraud” — allegations that emanate from Txxxx and his allies — that he said have “produced a deep, deep distrust of our democratic process across the country.” This is the arsonist calling the fire department to put out the blaze that he kindled.

“I think we in Congress have an obligation to do something about that,” Cruz lectured. “We have an obligation to protect the integrity of the democratic system.”

Oh please. No one has done more over the past months to undermine the integrity of the democratic system than Txxxx and his enablers. And if Cruz is actually worried about the integrity of the democratic system, he [should] start with the president.

There must be a response to a president who exploits his office for the purpose of overthrowing an election. The evidence is on tape. The next attorney general should move forward, if for no other reason, to deter further attempts at such reprehensible conduct. I would suggest impeachment as well, which could include a ban on holding office in the future, but we know already Republicans will defend anything Txxxx does [even if he declares himself King Donald the First and makes Ivanka his queen].

[If you choose to endure it, the Post has the audio and a transcript.]