 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. I'll haunt it by the past. Okay, this is the thin line on history lens. Marco Mangostore from Provision Solar in Hilo joins me by Voip Phone. He's a concerned citizen, as am I. There have been some incredible events that have happened in the building behind me lately. And as it works out, he had written a think piece before any of this broke. So this is an important discussion because it's dynamic. It's happening while we speak. The subject of this show is being covered on national news, a number of channels right now at this moment. Let it never be said that we are not current on things happening in this country. So Marco, let's talk about your think piece. Welcome to the show and tell us how you got involved to write a think piece about the question of conscience versus loyalty in federal government. On the show, Jay, and it's kind of unusual that our usual talking points together have to do with the exciting subject of renewable energy in Hawaii and energy in general. So I appreciate very much the opportunity to veer from our usual subject matter and talk about stuff of equally important but of a different nature. And I read a book. In fact, it was one of my father's books that he was quite the book collector during his time last year amongst the many, many paperbacks that he kept and read over the years. And this particular book was called Nuremberg Diary. Nuremberg Diary written by an American Army officer by the name of Gustav Gilbert who was fluent in German. He was a psychologist. And he had unfettered access to the 20-plus Nazis both within the government of Fidel Hitler, the military, civilians as well, who were on trial, who were about to trial in Nuremberg, Germany after the end of World War II. And Gilbert, as I said, had unfettered access to these individuals including Herman Gehring, who was the number two to Hitler, Yodel, who was the chief of staff of operations, Wilhelm Keitel, who was the chief of staff to the general staff, the Wehrmacht, the German military. And he wrote a book about his observations and interviews with these Nazis as they were being tried by the International Tribunal. And it got me to thinking about some of the striking parallels between the rise of Hitler and Hitlerism in the Nazis from 1933 when Hitler was duly elected chancellor of Germany to his final end there in April May, I believe it was 1945. And I got to thinking about how is it that people of good conscience and integrity, whether in the military or whether in the civilian workforce, how they were essentially corrupted over time, over the years by the abomination of national socialism in Naziism in Hitler and Germany. And while I want to be careful and not easily or willfully describe as someone as a Nazi, because I think that is a far off too often used epithet, it just got me wondering about the current age in which we are living in terms of having Donald J. Trump who was duly elected by majority of the electoral college back in November 2016. How is it that, in my opinion, there are some striking similarities between what the testimony was of these people on trial for their lives during the Nuremberg trials in terms of how they dealt with the abominations that they were witnessing and knew of in the case of persecution, not just of Jews but also of people of non-Aryan dissent, gypsies, Roma, homosexuals, Slavs and so forth. How is it that people supposedly of good faith and integrity, moral integrity, allowed themselves to be so debased in associating with someone like Adolf Hitler. And I found some very striking and rather terrifying parallels in terms of how apparently they felt the duty to the German state, the duty and loyalty to their leader, Chancellor and Führer, Adolf Hitler, how that somehow corrupted their own individual senses of responsibility and morality and allowed them to be a part of an abominable period of our history, not so far just in history, and what they perpetrated across millions and millions of people across eastern, western, northern, southern Europe. So that led me to... By the way, that's all very relevant these days. Just said Germany, for one reason or another, is turning right. Angela Merkel, who's one of my heroes, she's very progressive, but she's had trouble staying a leader in the German parliament because of the rise of conservatives, sometimes very far-right-wing conservatives in Germany. And indeed, two, three days ago, there was an article in The Times about a little village in the south of Germany called Hexheim, H-E-X-H-E-I-M, which has a bell in the church, which was put there by Adolf Hitler in 1934, and which bears the swastika on it. And the town of Hexheim is polarized over this. People come from both sides of the aisle and protest and express themselves on whether the bell should be removed. And it's an issue about whether they want to incorporate the bell into their view of history as a ripple along the way, or whether it's anathema and it should be removed immediately. It's not yet settled whether to remove the bell as a device from Nazi Germany. So the issue is pretty hot right now about how Hitler operated and how he got the average person in the street to go along with the crazy things he was doing. And that's instructive in our time, and you wouldn't be the first one that makes a comparison between the Hitler in the 1930s and what's happening in the Trump administration. Yes, I agree, and that's what led me to write what I wrote to try to bring to light the tug that I'm sure must be going on within those people in the White House, the cabinet members and sub-cabinet members who see themselves more as patriots as opposed to partisans, but who are serving a chief executive, a commander in chief, who has, without I think, just getting into anything controversial in terms of making the claim that this particular individual has pushed the norms and boundaries to a very humongous extent in terms of the course of action and the playing field in terms of what a president does or what a president has done. I mean, Mr. Trump has stretched many, many norms, some would say, to the breaking point, I mean, he certainly has been a transformative president in multiple ways, and you have people such as Chief of Staff John Kelly, who is a former four-star retired general. You have James Mattis also, if I'm not mistaken, four-star retired Marine Corps general, who is Secretary of Defense. You had H.R. McMaster, who is a three-star Army general, who was the chief, excuse me, national security advisor to the president. Rex Tillerson was a civilian, but also a man of some repute. How is it that you have these individuals, how are they internalizing the tug and the conflict within them between the duty they have to their commander in chief? Donald J. Trump versus the duty that they have to the nation and enter their own moral and ethical consciousness? Yes, to say nothing of the Republican Party, the Republican Party, who seems to go in lockstep with him on nearly any legislative initiative he wants to endorse, and they will agree with him, even when it's obvious that they shouldn't. So you get that same issue of loyalty to Trump against conscience. And I think this is not a recipe for success. It's not sustainable because Trump himself is reckless and immoral and willful disregard of the Constitution and the laws of the United States and of humanity. So when that happens, even if these guys would be likely to follow him in better circumstances, they become less likely when he is decompensating, which, you know, we have a lot of indications that he is decompensating. So what is the conclusion of the article that you wrote? I should say the thought piece that you wrote. The thought piece that I wrote. Maybe I can just read to you the last two or three paragraphs, I think, rather than trying to paraphrase my own words, if that's okay, I'll just read the last couple of three paragraphs. Sure. Strikingly, even though most of those judged at Nuremberg acknowledged that there had been horrible crimes committed, they claimed that they had individually acted in good faith according to the standards of their respective positions and professions. Admitting to no dereliction of duty, the generals and admirals had only followed orders. The politicians had only acted for the good of the nation and the financiers had only taken care of business. To what degree, the tension between loyalty and conscience is playing out among those closest to power in the Trump administration. Perhaps it won't be known until after the end of his presidency and the release of more tell-all memoirs. So far, those in top-level positions who have left are keeping any possible internal conflicts experienced to themselves. With no shortage of both domestic and foreign policies and actions pushing and often breaking long-established boundaries coming from this White House, this tension is likely to play out with even greater intensity. Complicity or worse in facilitating the denigration, if not destruction of the bedrock principles of our constitutional republic must not be overlooked amid the daily political din. Too much is at stake. And I'll add to that the blockbuster, as you mentioned in a previous conversation we had a little while ago, the blockbuster today of this anonymous op-ed which was published most unusually by the New York Times because they rarely, if ever, publish an op-ed that is not, someone doesn't take ownership to. But this apparently is from a so-called senior and a high-level administration official who submitted this to The Times. And his last, his or her last sentence says, quote, the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one, Americans. So it's that tension between patriotism and loyalty to the nation and to America and the constitutional republic for which we stand for and loyalty to your boss, your chief executive, your commander-in-chief, and apparently that tension is coming to a high boil now, especially with Bob Woodward's book that has just been released these past days, simply titled Fear in addition, and with the addition of this op-ed piece which was published by The Times today. So apparently we are going truly in uncharted waters here, Jay, in terms of where else is this going to go in this White House? What's going to be the next big shoe to fall? And it's just pretty striking. I mean, I've never, as a citizen, as an American, never experienced anything like this, and I think the day after the election in November 2016, a lot of us had a fair amount of anxiety in terms of where was this relatively unknown man in terms of not having any governmental experience, where was he going to lead the nation? And I certainly would never predict it. I couldn't predict, could not have predicted it. I think very, very few people could have predicted that we would be in the place where we are right now. It's been remarkable, and it's been getting worse. And he's been getting worse. But the interesting parallel that you drew in your think piece is, you know, it's all the more poignant. Because the guys in the White House, and for that matter, the guys in Congress who follow him in the Republican Party, they do have or should have this crisis of loyalty versus conscience. And some of them have been in lockstep the whole time. They have not in any way diverged or shown any lack of loyalty, except for a few like John McCain, to Trump. And loyalty to Trump has somehow been conflated to loyalty to the nation. So if you're loyal to Trump, you're loyal to the nation. And if you're a department head like Sessions, you're supposed to be loyal to Trump, not to the nation. And this issue you've raised is out there in extremis. This is the same thing, the same issue that should have been raised in Nazi Germany. No, I can't just follow orders. And I think that's the American culture, the American governmental culture, if you will, that's coming up now after, what, 18 months. Finally, we see that there are people who are not going to just follow orders. And I hope this happens with the existing Republican Party or with the remade Republican Party, hopefully, after November. So what we have is a huge sea change going on. And it all emanates from his decompensation. He's decompensating. So we have your article or your think piece, which actually, I think, has been on the minds of a lot of people over the last year, including me. And then we have Bob Woodward's book that came out. It was actually leaked to, I forget what, media or the Washington Post. And it will be released on September 11th. It's an interesting choice of a release day. And you can buy it on Amazon right now in advance. You won't get it until September 11th, but you can buy it. And presales have been enormous. This is going to be a best seller. I mean, they set it up so that in the week between the time it was leaked to the Washington Post and the time it comes out, so you can read it in verbatim, there's going to be all kinds of discussion about it. And there have been many shows on TV and many commentaries in the newspaper about this book. And this book is a well-documented study by a notable journalist who was responsible for bringing Richard Nixon down, a first-class political journalist, Woodward, who now has talked to hundreds of people over hundreds of hours of interview, recorded, by the way, including people who were there, who were in the White House and who saw what Trump was doing from day to day. And who heard him talk and heard others talk at him. And Woodward has revealed this in his book. It's an extraordinary book. It will be very, very popular, I think. People will want to know what's really happening. And you come to find that there's no method behind the madness, just madness, just reckless behavior from day to day, moment to moment, where nobody around him could follow what he was doing. And so what you have is this landscape that Woodward describes, followed by the op-ed piece in today's New York Times. It's moving faster, logarithmically faster now. And the op-ed piece in the New York Times actually supports everything that Woodward said, even though Trump and his press secretary have said, ah, it's all bunk, none of it is true, they made it up. Well, the fact is that Woodward didn't make it up. The fact is it's been corroborated by somebody who the Times knows, but the Times is sympathetic and doesn't want to see him lose his position in the White House staff. So the Times doesn't reveal his name, which is really a remarkable thing for the Times. And it's confirmed, Woodward's book is confirmed by this guy who wrote the op-ed piece one day later. Quite remarkable. And it suggests that there are other people. In fact, it says there are other people in the White House as part of the same group. They have conscience, but they don't want to leave. I'm sure they've thought of the idea of resigning on many occasions as most of us would, but they have decided to stay and protect the country from where they are. This is very noble and as you say, sure enough, it's going to come out as to who they are. I can imagine right now, right now, Marco, Trump is pounding around the White House trying to figure out who did it. It's Captain Quig in the court of strawberries. He's going to spend, you know, days, weeks even trying to figure out who did it so he can fire him. What makes it worse for the paranoia that I'm sure he's experiencing is that it's not one person. It's actually a group of people and they all feel the same way. So is this president going to be able to continue in office? Is this president going to be able to continue what he's been doing? Is this president going to have anybody really, truly loyal to him and supporting him? Those days are gone forever. And the question is, can we impeach him? Shouldn't we impeach him? This is non-functional. He's going to be into the court of strawberries for months. And Quiri, you know, how does that work on a domestic level, on an economic level? How does that work in terms of dealing with Congress and the public? What do they call them? The guys in the White House called them a professional liar. Kelly or one of the others said he was a professional liar. Well, you know, I think it's even worse. So what you have is a non-sustainable presidency. And Quiri, whether the Republican Party is going to come around, now or after November, and throw him out. Because we as a nation cannot afford any more of this. We are completely dysfunctional. The policies that he has made are completely dysfunctional and are getting us into trouble on every quarter. Do you want to rebut any of that? Oh, man. No, I don't want to go there. I wouldn't try to do that. I'm most fascinated kind of from the individual psychological drama going on within these various individuals. And again, trying to find parallels between Gilbert's, Gustav Gilbert's observations going back to Nuremberg, which is there is a seduction of being close to power. I think that if you can't be president of the United States and you aspire to position of great power, since of course the vast majority of people will never be president, the closest you can get is to be a top-level subordinate. You are close to power as you're likely ever to be. And I think there's a powerful seductive quality of that in doing that. And as you kind of alluded to a few moments ago, and this was very, very prevalent in Nuremberg where you had multiple individuals who were being tried who believed and stated so in their testimony that they felt that they're sticking around working under Adolf Hitler, they would be able to moderate his worst instincts, moderate his behavior, and that if they were to leave that things would only get worse. So without getting into the head or doing too much psychobabble analysis of former General James Kelly, former General James Mattis, I have to speculate that there is some of that going on in their minds and others close to President Trump who do believe that they are doing the nation a service by sticking around to that administration because if they were to leave and there's a fair amount of ego involved there, there has to be, if they were to leave, their replacement would only be doing worse and therefore the nation would suffer. So this is the same, I believe, similar rationalizations that went on 70-plus years ago and were expressed by these people on trial for their lives at Nuremberg that's going on right now in the Trump White House. The seductiveness of being close to power that's hard to walk away from the belief, true or false, that you sticking around, that Mattis sticking around, that John Kelly sticking around, that so-and-so sticking around is going to moderate the worst instincts and the worst behavior, the worst proclivities of this particular individual. Yeah, the military guys presents a kind of issue to me because they're picked as military. It doesn't have to have military people in there. He has a raft of them. And what is it about military that's different than ordinary people on the street? Well, they used to follow orders. That's what they were trained to do. That's what they have done through long and successful careers. They have successfully followed orders. It means they're loyal to the ordering authority. And it reminds me, I told you before the show that when I first came to Hawaii, I was introduced to a fellow who was bilingual, spoke German and English, and who was in the United States Army right after the war, and he was one of the interpreters, if not the chief interpreter at Nuremberg. And he saw those trials you were talking about. He interpreted what the Germans were saying in those trials. And when I met him, I remembered that he talked about what their standard defense was. The standard defense was the defense you always find in situations which were immoral or amoral. And that is I was only following orders. So a lot of those Nazis in those trials said I was only following orders. I was loyal to my boss. So loyalty enters into this. Now in Woodward's book, he talks about remarks by both Kelly and Matisse, Mattis, that were uncomplementary to Trump, where they called Trump names like idiot, and said that Trump had the same understanding of North Korea as a fifth or sixth grader would have. I mean, they were not complementary comments. After the comments about the book came out, after it became a public spectacular yesterday, they both fired off Twitter messages where they both denied that they'd ever said anything that was less than complementary to Trump. And in fact, they complimented him on his work as president. And I find that interesting because if you put that alongside what Woodward had said in the book, which was based on a variety of sources of people who heard those remarks being made in the White House, I would have to believe Woodward. I would not believe the tweets from either Kelly or Matisse. And so what is that operating that they would make those tweets? I can imagine Trump saying to them, you better clarify this, you better go back to the public and say, you never said anything stink about me, or else I'm going to fire you. And they took the bait. When you think about it, Jay, what choices do they have? Three options. One would be to say publicly that they corroborate Woodward's words, which would have meant their immediate either resignation or dismissal. Two, they could have stayed silent, which would have been a tacit, I think seen as a tacit admission that Woodward cited them accurately. Or three, they go out there and they push back and said, you never said such thing as beneath me so forth and so on. So, you know, it devolves into a, did they say it or not, with Woodward claiming that they did. He said, I stand behind my reporting. And people, you know, Madison Kelly, who said I never said any such thing. So both versions of reality cannot be right, right? Right. Well, this is, you know, I mean, I can see that in the years to come, or maybe the days or months to come, we'll find out more about Kelly and Madison and others in the White House. We'll find out, you know, what side of the fence they were really on, that they really are on. I mean, they could be operating out of loyalty, out of that same kind of loyalty that occupied the general staff in Germany. Or they could be operating out of that sort of constrained loyalty to the country. I'm in here as a mole. I'm really here to protect you. And actually, I'm not sure that that's totally ingenuous. That might be slightly disingenuous as a way to defend holding on to power and holding on to, you know, all the perks that go with being at the top of the heap in the White House. It's not clear to me that that really works for everybody who claims it. I was only protecting the country. Maybe the same thing is I was only following orders. The question is, where did the orders come from? And the other thing I'd like to point out, and maybe this is something we should talk about for a minute anyway, and that is, does it stop here, Marco? I mean, you were prescient in writing your think piece. It's almost as if you knew what would happen only 24 or 48 hours later that this thing would break and that he would be shown to have been decompensating on a daily basis in the White House, that he was reckless and wild in all of his thinking and the way he handled people. Just like, you know, the crazy decisions he made on the apprentice show years ago. You're fired. But, you know, it strikes me that this is decompensating to the point where we can make an assumption that these are not the only guys, that the guys in Woodward's book are not the only people, that this anonymous writer, op-ed writer in the New York Times, is not the end of it. And as he suggested, there are others. There is a group in the White House. And I would like to offer the thought to your comment that there are groups in the departments too. He's appointed some real followers, some blind followers as department heads around federal government. But I'm not sure that the second tier people in federal government look, for example, at the Department of Justice. That second tier is probably not loyal to him. And so what we have is the possibility of other op-ed pieces. It's rolling down the hill. This is a snowball, don't you think? It's hard to make, for me as a political analyst, it's hard for me to make a case that this, let's call it big waiver, tsunami has crusted. It doesn't seem to me that there's an end in sight as far as the drama, the turbulence, and the instability of our executive, chief executive, who's in the White House at present, as far as the next shoes to fall. I mean, there's the looming release at some point, hopefully not in the too far distant future of Robert Mueller's special counsel report that he'll be submitting to Rod Rosenstein and that'll be made public soon thereafter. We have elections, midterm elections, in just a little over two months that a lot of pundits are seeing as being, whether it's a teeny tiny blue wave or a mid-sized blue wave or a big blue wave or a tsunami blue wave, of course we have to wait and see, but it doesn't seem to me that the drama that has been essentially such so acute and so high-pitched and so high decibel over the past several days, it doesn't seem like that drama is going to die down anytime soon, and as far as how it's all going to play out, I'm not prescient enough to see an end game, but typically as, you know, you use the word decompensate a number of times, Jay, as one decompensates more and more and becomes further detached and becomes connected to the more commonly held, dare I say, objective reality around them, the farther out they get, the more apparent and wild and crazy and perhaps risky and dangerous their behavior and their decisions may get. So I think that's certainly something that concerns me and I think a lot of people, just how much further given an increased feeling of paranoia within the White House, especially in light of this anonymous op-ed piece coming out, you know, how is that going to add to the stability or instability within the mind and the emotions and the core of Donald J. Trump? And I don't think things look particularly positive right now as far as things getting better before they get worse. Yeah, I agree. That's the issue. That's the issue we have to leave it on. What happens to him? He's a dynamic too. And he can't just keep on saying, well, they're all making it up. All of this increasing group, they're all in this huge conspiracy, all to bring me down. That doesn't work anymore. So what are his options in terms of defending himself against an increasing number of people who are revealing what life is like in the White House and in the government? So it's hard to say what he would do, but I agree with you, there's a substantial possibility that he will further decompensate, that he will do more reckless things, and after all, he's still the president. I hope those guys can contain him when he starts to go further south. Well, thank you, Marco. What a great discussion. Thank you for sharing your think piece with us. And I look forward to our next discussion soon on energy or possibly other things. Thank you so much. My pleasure, Jay. My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on for this special edition of Jane Marco and Haunted by the Past. Okay. History Lens. We'll see you soon. Allah hafiz. Thank you.