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“Nearly 20 Percent Of Mr. Trump’s Voters Disagreed With Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation”

February 25, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, an Orange Supremacist, has been opportunistic on many fronts–the GOP’s splintering, the decentralization of media, the destabilization of the American middle class–but isn’t it possible a good part of his ascendancy comes from a large number of white citizens being resentful they can no longer use racial slurs without consequence? Nearly every Trump supporter interviewed credits him with “speaking the truth” or “saying what they’d like to say,” which has a pretty clear meaning when you consider his remarks before and after entering politics. Being frightened doesn’t mean turning ugly, but Trump supporters seem to have been just waiting for the opportunity.

In a new interview, Noam Chomsky argues that the ridiculing realtor’s rise is the result of exploited fears, but polls show bigotry may be at least as responsible. Two excerpts follow.

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From Aaron Williams at AlterNet:

Question: 

What are your opinions on the surprising progress of Donald Trump? Could it be explained by a climate of fear?

Noam Chomsky: 

Fear, along with the breakdown of society during the neoliberal period. People feel isolated, helpless, victim of powerful forces that they do not understand and cannot influence. It’s interesting to compare the situation in the ‘30s, which I’m old enough to remember. Objectively, poverty and suffering were far greater. But even among poor working people and the unemployed, there was a sense of hope that is lacking now, in large part because of the growth of a militant labor movement and also the existence of political organizations outside the mainstream.•

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From Lynn Vavreck at the New York Times:

Nationally, further analyses of the YouGov data show a similar trend: Nearly 20 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters disagreed with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in the Southern states during the Civil War. Only 5 percent of Mr. Rubio’s voters share this view.

Mr. Trump’s popularity with white, working-class voters who are more likely than other Republicans to believe that whites are a supreme race and who long for the Confederacy may make him unpopular among leaders in his party. But it’s worth noting that he isn’t persuading voters to hold these beliefs. The beliefs were there — and have been for some time.

Mr. Trump has reinvigorated explicit appeals to ethnocentrism, and some voters are responding.•

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“It’s A Very Successful Garage”

February 23, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, a willful mix of Kardashian and Klansman, made a casino go bankrupt, so let’s see what he can do with an entire country.

It’s possible in America to be both fabulously wealthy and a complete bonehead. Take Trump, who is a “brand” in an age of “reality,” whose main contribution to this political season has been to be shameless enough to say the most vile racist and xenophobic things to play upon fears and rile hatred, all because that’s what he senses it will take to be a “winner.” To someone so shallow, running for President is just another “shopportunity,” like creating lines of fragrances or energy drinks. For now, those ugly remarks and predatory instincts have been enough to float what has to be the most deeply unqualified major-party candidate of our era.

As Trump himself says in Susanne Craig and David W. Chen’s quietly devastating NYT piece about the his lack of cachet in New York City real-estate and political circles: “I started going international and national, which is what we are doing now, and then I did the presidential thing, so that to me is cooler than all of it.” Yes, that thing. 

An excerpt:

Mr. Trump has embraced his roots as a New Yorker as being crucial to his presidential bid, and in so doing, the Republican candidate has given the impression as he crossed the country that he is a force to reckon with in the city of his birth.

But while Trump remains a visible brand name around the city’s five boroughs, it is much harder to discern his imprint as a classic power broker, someone who is feared and can make things happen with a phone call or a quiet aside with the right person at the right time.

His real estate holdings in New York are modest; he did not make the top 10 in lists of major condominium developers and power players in real estate in the city, as judged by several publications. He does not belong to trade groups like the Real Estate Board of New York or the Association for a Better New York. He rarely interacts with top politicians or government officials, or contributes to campaigns. Discussions about running for governor in 2014 never got off the ground.

Though he portrays himself as a major developer, his companies’ highest profile ownership stakes in real estate in New York include an office building on Wall Street; part of another on Avenue of the Americas; commercial space at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, where he lives; and parking below the Trump Plaza on East 61st Street.

“It’s a very successful garage,” he said in a telephone interview.•

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“Much Like Donald Trump, Facts Are Stubborn Things”

February 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Remember the good old days when the Republican Party used racism as seasoning, not the whole meal?

The GOP power brokers have long used the coded language of exclusion to seal the deal with white Americans whom they assumed were mainly present for their policies. But Donald Trump, who made the asinine prediction above about Obamacare in 2011, actually says now he approves of most of the key tenets of the Affordable Care Act. In fact, he sometimes can actually be to the Left of what the Obama Administration accomplished. It wasn’t Obama’s legislation that was actually a prickly problem, then what was besides partisanship and the President’s race? It wasn’t that the suit was too tan but the skin.

Trump’s not really selling any conservative policies, and I’m sure evangelicals aren’t buying his bible-salesman bullshit. What he has to offer is the unvarnished language of bigotry and anti-immigration. He seems mostly to have risen because of his stab in the dark that there a large amount of white Americans who really miss being able to use racial slurs without consequences. So many Trump voters have said in entrance and exit polls they like him because he “tells it like it is.” But he never does. He just says hateful, prejudiced things. The coded language has shifted from the leader to the followers.

From “Trump’s Hostile Takeover Gains Pace,” by Edward Luce of the Financial Times:

Much like Donald Trump, facts are stubborn things. No Republican has ever won both New Hampshire and South Carolina and failed to win the nomination. Yet two earth-shattering victories later, swaths of the Republican establishment continue to think Mr Trump will prove an exception to that rule.

As it happens, they thought his campaign would implode six months ago. The last to know are always those in charge. This is how C-suites react to hostile bids. First there is denial. Then anger. Then bargaining. Eventually they succumb to depression.

In the case of Mr Trump, Republicans might as well jump straight to the latter. It is hard to overstate how emphatically the party’s rank and file have repudiated their leaders in the past two weeks

It is likely to get worse. On Tuesday, Mr Trump will almost certainly sweep Nevada, according to the polls. A week later most of the Bible Belt will vote in the Super Tuesday primaries on March 1 that will select a huge slate of delegates. With almost three-quarters of voters declaring themselves evangelical, South Carolina was about as biblical as a primary could be.

Not only did Mr Trump win 43 per cent of evangelical voters, according to exit polls. He won many more than his scripture-quoting rival, Ted Cruz. The portents for Texas, the most important state on Super Tuesday, look ominous.

To underline, the overtly Christian Mr Cruz lost hands down among socially conservative voters to a thrice-married, Pope-insulting, profanity-spewing, casino-owning mogul from New York.•

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“The SandersForPresident SubReddit Is More Popular Than Pages Featuring Cars, Beer Or Even Porn”

February 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Donald Trump, John Gotti with a Southern strategy, is considering telling the Pope to go scratch his ass with a broken milk bottle.

The other “anti-establishment” candidate, Bernie Sanders, who’s been in D.C. for decades, has become a darling of the Left for identifying serious problems with healthcare, prison overcrowding, etc., and offering sweeping solutions often based on Paul Ryan-esque fuzzy math. The Un-Hillary has been aided in his shocking ascendancy by a cadre of mostly young coders who’ve enabled the eldest candidate in the race to be the most app-friendly. The unsolicited volunteers work remotely and are usually not familiar with one another except virtually.

From Darren Samuelsohn at Politico:

Late last spring, inspired to action by what he was hearing from a renegade Democratic candidate named Bernie Sanders, Jon Hughes began building a website. Hughes, then a 29-year-old father in southern Oregon, didn’t have any connection to the Sanders campaign; in fact, the last presidential candidate he’d been interested in was Ron Paul back in 2012. But he knew how to code and built a page that does a very simple but important job: You click on your location, and it tells you where and when to vote in the Democratic primary or caucus. It launched in June.

Today his site, voteforbernie.org, has landed over 2 million unique views. It’s the top search hit not only for people who want to support Sanders, but for anyone simply googling “how to vote in the primaries.” All across America, people looking simply to participate in the primaries are now directed straight to a site that asks, in large and florid lettering, “Will you be able to Vote for Bernie?”
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The site is just one of the dozens of websites, tools and apps built by coders lining up behind Bernie Sanders, often people—like Hughes— with no affiliation to the campaign at all. Behind Sanders’ astonishing success in the primaries so far stands a coterie of more than 1,000 volunteer techies pumping out innovations like this at a rate of about one new app a week.

If viral videos, data analytics, Twitter and meet-up pages were the big breakthroughs of past presidential elections, 2016 could very well go down as the year of the app. And no one has been a bigger beneficiary than Sanders, an anti-establishment independent-turned-Democrat with legions of code-savvy, unpaid helpers. Many of his volunteer coders are under-30 political neophytes first drawn to Sanders through a fan-driven Reddit page, an online message board that is far and away the largest for anyone in the 2016 field. With more than 188,000 subscribers, the SandersForPresident subReddit is more popular than pages featuring cars, beer or even porn.•

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“American Egalitarianism Is On Its Last Legs”

February 14, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Among U.S. scholars, none seem to casually elide more inconvenient truths than Charles Murray, who somehow claims to love both meritocracy and Sarah Palin. He can make solid sociological points, but he’s also a believer in American myths that were never quite true, especially if you weren’t a white male. 

Murray argues in a WSJ essay that Donald Trump is benefiting from those who feel America is losing its national identity, which he says is rooted in three qualities: egalitarianism, liberty and individualism. Well, cross off the first two for large swaths of the population and even the third during long periods of our history when conformity was the norm. It’s big of Murray to acknowledge that “there are certainly elements of racism and xenophobia in Trumpism”–you don’t say, Chuck?–but he sees it as subplot rather than driving narrative.

His description of wealthy Americans “seceding from the mainstream” is limited by his blinders, but there is value in the passage. Citizens without money being thought of as “losers” is often a sad reality. Oddly enough, it’s very Trumpian.

An excerpt:

America also retained a high degree of social and cultural heterogeneity in its communities. Tocqueville wrote of America in the 1830s as a place where “the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people.” That continued well into the 20th century, even in America’s elite neighborhoods. In the 1960 census, the median income along Philadelphia’s Main Line was just $90,000 in today’s dollars. In Boston’s Brookline, it was $75,000; on New York’s Upper East Side, just $60,000. At a typical dinner party in those neighborhoods, many guests would have had no more than a high-school diploma.

In the years since, the new upper class has evolved a distinctive culture. For a half-century, America’s elite universities have drawn the most talented people from all over the country, socialized them and often married them off to each other. Brains have become radically more valuable in the marketplace. In 2016, a dinner party in those same elite neighborhoods consists almost wholly of people with college degrees, even advanced degrees. They are much more uniformly affluent. The current median family incomes for the Main Line, Brookline and the Upper East Side are about $150,000, $151,000 and $203,000, respectively.

And the conversation at that dinner party is likely to be completely unlike the conversations at get-togethers in mainstream America. The members of the new upper class are seldom attracted to the films, TV shows and music that are most popular in mainstream America. They have a distinctive culture in the food they eat, the way they take care of their health, their child-rearing practices, the vacations they take, the books they read, the websites they visit and their taste in beer. You name it, the new upper class has its own way of doing it.

Another characteristic of the new upper class—and something new under the American sun—is their easy acceptance of being members of an upper class and their condescension toward ordinary Americans. Try using “redneck” in a conversation with your highly educated friends and see if it triggers any of the nervousness that accompanies other ethnic slurs. Refer to “flyover country” and consider the implications when no one asks, “What does that mean?” Or I can send you to chat with a friend in Washington, D.C., who bought a weekend place in West Virginia. He will tell you about the contempt for his new neighbors that he has encountered in the elite precincts of the nation’s capital.

For its part, mainstream America is fully aware of this condescension and contempt and is understandably irritated by it. American egalitarianism is on its last legs.

While the new upper class was seceding from the mainstream, a new lower class was emerging from within the white working class, and it has played a key role in creating the environment in which Trumpism has flourished.•

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“Donald Trump Does Not Do Nuance”

February 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump is measuring the White House windows for curtains, when he’s not busy measuring his penis. 

There’s long been an argument that exorbitant wealth inequality doesn’t matter if the poorest among us (a widening group) see their standard of living improve somewhat while a few have theirs increase exponentially. Everyone is getting better, so who cares?

First, that balance seems a rare thing, and even if it can be achieved, a small number will be able to tilt power in their favor at will. Second, when things go bust, and they always do eventually, those at the lower end are hurt inordinately. Things then can get ugly, when reality gets ragged, and not only are scapegoats sought but so are those who can point them out. 

A nativist seems appealing in that unhappy situation. A fascist, even. Where have you gone, Benito Mussolini? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

From Edward McClelland at Salon:

Donald Trump stepped into the gymnasium at New Hampshire’s Plymouth State University to the opening riff of The Beatles’ “Revolution.” Never mind that it’s a song mocking the pretensions of self-styled revolutionaries. Donald Trump does not do nuance. Donald Trump does bold, garish strokes. The song is loud and it’s got the word “revolution” in it. That’s what Donald Trump wants.
 
It was the day after the last debate before the New Hampshire primary, but Trump didn’t want to brag about his performance. He wanted to talk about how “rich donors and special interests” had hogged all the tickets, leaving college students outside in the snow. The crowd, waving signs that read “The Silent Majority Stands With Trump,” booed loudly.

“I look at these people who have tremendous money,” Trump said. “They’re wasting their money. They should give it to the vets. It’s the special interests: people who represent insurance companies, oil companies, drug companies. I’m their worst nightmare, because I’m not taking their money. I’m richer than they are. I don’t need your money. I need your vote.”

Live and in person, Trump is reminiscent of Regis Philbin: an overexcited New Yorker riffing off the top of his head and emphasizing his points with broad hand gestures: the OK sign, the “whaddya-whaddya” open-palmed shrug. Like a lot of people in the crowd, I was there for the Trumpertainment, hoping the most uninhibited performer in American politics would threaten to shoot someone, or make a pussy joke about one of his enemies in the media or the Republican primary. Seeing Trump is like seeing Marilyn Manson, circa 1995: you’re not there for the music.•

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“This Echo Chamber Deluded Its Believers To The Point That It Sometimes Apparently Killed Them”

February 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Donald Trump, Milosevic with a trophy wife, hopes to add a stripper pole to the Lincoln Bedroom.

In his latest op-ed, Nicholas Kristof credits Trump as “smarter than critics believe,” asserting that the hideous hotelier “understood the political mood better than we pundits did.” I think it more likely that Trump is a blowhole who merely threw shit at the wall and was as surprised as anyone that it stuck. If you could go back in time to moments after his candidacy announcement and ask him what line would get the most attention, I doubt he would identify the “they’re rapists” slur about Mexicans.

Kristof goes on to belatedly state what many people (myself included) have been saying for months: The GOP created this Frankenstein monster of a political season it can’t control, though he illustrates it with an interesting fact about echo-chamber misinformation manifesting itself in the real world. An excerpt:

Political nastiness and conspiracy theories were amplified by right-wing talk radio, television and websites — and, yes, there are left-wing versions as well, but they are much less influential. Democrats often felt disadvantaged by the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, but in retrospect Limbaugh and Fox created a conservative echo chamber that hurt the Republican Party by tugging it to the right and sometimes breeding a myopic extremism in which reality is irrelevant.

A poll released in September found that Republicans were more likely to think that Obama was born abroad than that Ted Cruz was. That poll found that Trump supporters believed by nearly a three-to-one ratio that Obama was born overseas.

The Republican establishment profited from the insinuations that Obama is a Muslim, that he’s anti-American, that his health care plan would lead to “death panels.” Rick Perry has described Trump as a “cancer on conservatism” and said his movement is “a toxic mix of demagoguery and meanspiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition” — indeed, but it was a mix that too many Republican leaders accepted as long as it worked for them.

This echo chamber deluded its believers to the point that it sometimes apparently killed them. During the 2009-10 flu pandemic, right-wing broadcasters like Limbaugh and Glenn Beck denounced the call for flu shots, apparently seeing it as a nefarious Obama plot.

The upshot was that Democrats were 50 percent more likely than Republicans to say that they would get flu shots, according to a peer-reviewed article in The Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. So when the pandemic killed up to 18,000 Americans, they presumably were disproportionately conservatives.•

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“Anything Could Happen”

February 10, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, Pinochet with a line of men’s fragrances, would seem to have a proper path forward in the GOP race. With the next month of Republican primaries favoring far-right pols, and the trio of Kasich, Rubio and Bush subtracting from one another, the Reality TV realtor need only outpace Ted Cruz, a rat trap of a man and the only person in America more unlikable than him. Trump isn’t a true conservative, but he’s clearly communicated his intention to “Make America Great White Again.” At this point, his campaign can’t be disqualified by anything he says, no matter how repugnant, but will instead rise or fall based on how many caucasians in the U.S. deeply resent no longer being able to use the N-word without consequence. 

It’s not as easy to see a similar road to success for the other upstart, Bernie Sanders, despite his rousing N.H. win and Hillary Clinton’s vulnerabilities. Until the race moves past Super Tuesday, the Vermont Senator will walk headlong into an unforgiving slate of mostly Southern states where he’ll have to pick up non-white voters, something he’s thus far shown little flair for. Sanders could be trailing badly by the time we move deeper into March, so he needs to change that reality before the South Carolina primary.

From Edward Luce in the Financial Times:

Nobody knows better than the Clintons the power of early state momentum.

In his victory speech, Mr Sanders said he was travelling to New York on Wednesday — “but not to raise money from Wall Street.” In fact, he will be breakfasting with the Reverend Al Sharpton, the radical black pastor, who seems likely to endorse him. Other black celebrities have been lined up.

Mr Sanders has two weeks, and the media wind at his back, to turn South Carolina into another victory. If he pulls that off, he will join Mr Trump as odds-on favourite to win his party’s nomination. The polls say Mrs Clinton will halt Mr Sanders’ progress south of the Mason-Dixon Line. But pre-New Hampshire polls are now virtually worthless. Anything could happen.

Both parties may be on course to endorse candidates who repudiate much of what they stand for.

If there was ever a moment Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, was tempted to run for the White House, it may be fast approaching.•

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“I Think We Could Have Used A Better Ground Game, A Term I Wasn’t Even Familiar With”

February 3, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Ted Cruz may be the most loathsome serious Presidential candidate of our time, and Marco Rubio seems a bullshit artist who reportedly has a lot of skeletons rattling around in his closet, but this pair of jokers outmaneuvered Donald Trump on many levels in Iowa. That’s because he’s a dummkopf in general and particularly in regard to politics. Arrogant people lacking in self-awareness almost always also lack attention to detail.

Having entered the race on a whim because he hoped to masturbate to donuts in the Lincoln bedroom, Trump then received an avalanche of attention for his vicious and biased remarks, propelling his whole idiot campaign. Now, even though he’s not been completely ejected from the clown-car process thanks to sheer odiousness of his fellow candidates, Trump’s flailing wildly. Here’s what the man who compared Ben Carson to a child molester had to say post-Hawkeye State:

[Trump] added that a mailer in Iowa sent by Cruz’s campaign that revealed neighbors’ voting participation was malicious: “He insulted Ben Carson by doing what he did to Ben Carson. That was a disgrace…. He’s a man of insult.”•

In a rare moment of clarity, the blockhead who managed to bankrupt a casino acknowledged that he screwed the pooch in Iowa. From Kia Makarechi at Vanity Fair:

The post-Iowa reckoning continued Wednesday morning, with Donald Trump speed-dialing into MSNBC’s Morning Joe for an awkward postmortem. Trump, who has been the Republican presidential poll-leader for months, placed second in the Iowa caucuses Monday night, three percentage points behind Ted Cruz.

To hear Trump tell it, the loss was easily preventable. The only problem? He has no idea how to run a campaign.

“I think we could have used a better ground game, a term I wasn’t even familiar with,” Trump said. “You know, when you hear ‘ground game,’ you say what the hell is that? Now I’m familiar with it. But, you know, I think in retrospect we should have had a better ground game. I would have funded a better ground game, but people told me our ground game was fine. And by most standards it was.”

Cruz’s campaign has been openly gloating about how it used advanced data modeling to invent positions for the candidate that would resonate with Iowa voters. Did you know that the Senator from Texas has strong views on Iowa’s fireworks ban? Neither did the Senator from Texas, until someone on his analytics team identified the ban as an issue that could sway some Iowan hearts and minds.•

 

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“A Huge Palace And Not A Single Book”

February 2, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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What a difference a day makes. Just before the Iowa caucuses, Donald Trump was labeled by Spiegel the “world’s most dangerous man.” If he were to become President, you could make that argument since he is ridiculously unqualified for the job, but the first-in-nation voting put a crimp in his effort. New Hampshire could revise the script again, but on Tuesday morning he seems more Pat Buchanan with hair plugs than Pol Pot.

It’s deplorable that our new media equation used Trump as cheap entertainment, as if it were just one more tacky yet harmless reality show. Even worse are the supposedly serious journalists who depicted him as merely a somewhat irreverent entertainer when he was making fascistic noise in a very important arena. 

That being said, the Spiegel article by Markus Feldenkirchen, Veit Medick and Holger Stark is still really good. An excerpt:

‘It’s a Miracle Trump Didn’t Invent the Selfie’

Michael D’Antonio is sitting in an Applebee’s fast-food restaurant on Long Island, speaking quietly. He’s a cheerful, thoughtful man with a white beard, the polar opposite of Trump. D’Antonio has delved a lot deeper than most others into Donald Trump’s world.

D’Antonio recently wrote a biography of Trump, who was enthusiastic about the project and gave his cooperation — at least initially. Trump granted the author several interviews, which were usually held in his penthouse inside the Trump Tower, behind the kinds of double doors that would normally be used in castles. D’Antonio was granted free access to Trump’s family and associates, and spoke with his grown children and all three of his wives. But when Trump realized that D’Antonio was also one of his critics, he immediately canceled the project.

“What I noticed immediately in my first visit was that there were no books,” says D’Antonio. “A huge palace and not a single book.” He asked Trump whether there was a book that had influenced him. “I would love to read,” Trump replied. “I’ve had many best sellers, as you know, and The Art of the Deal was one of the biggest-selling books of all time.” Soon Trump was talking about The Apprentice. Trump called it “the No. 1 show on television,” a reality TV show in which, in 14 seasons, he played himself and humiliated candidates vying for the privilege of a job within his company. In the interview, Trump spent what seemed like an eternity talking about how fabulous and successful he is, but he didn’t name a single book that he hadn’t written.

“Trump doesn’t read,” D’Antonio says in the restaurant. “He hasn’t absorbed anything serious and profound about American society since his college days. And to be honest, I don’t even think he read in college.” When Trump was asked who his foreign policy advisers were, he replied: “Well, I watch the shows.” He was referring to political talk shows on TV.

In all of the conversations about his life, Trump seemed like a little boy, says D’Antonio. “Like a six-year-old boy who comes home from the playground and can hardly wait to announce that he shot the decisive goal.”

According to D’Antonio, American society revolves around two things: ambition and self-promotion. This is why Trump is one of the most appropriate heroes he can imagine for the country, he adds, noting that no one is more ambitious and narcissistic. “It’s a miracle Trump didn’t invent the selfie.”•

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“Mr. Trump Thinks The Menstrual Cycle Is A Handicap”

January 27, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, Pol Pot with hair plugs, is like all bullies, a coward. His behavior stems from weakness and insecurity, so he can be handled. Jeb!, the favored son of a privileged family, doesn’t have adequate experience neutralizing such toxic types, but there are sure ways to deal. Lecture him about it in a mature way like Bernie Sanders and the hideous hotelier looks small. Aggressively return his obnoxious behavior like Megyn Kelly and he positively wilts. 

Women in particular throw Trump for a loss because he’s spent his life making sure he’s in a superior position to the ones in his life. He controls the purse strings and they should bleed in silence. Edward Luce’s latest Financial Times column about the 2016 race looks at this particular Trump shortcoming. The opening:

Hillary Clinton should be celebrating. Donald Trump’s decision to boycott the Fox News debate was ostensibly about ratings. How can the cable network make money without his celebrity pull? Mr Trump may prove his point when Thursday night’s viewership numbers come in.

But switching channels is not the same thing as showing up at a polling booth. More than half America’s electorate is female — they accounted for 53 per cent of the vote in the last election. Even the most apathetic will by now have heard Mr Trump’s opinions about Megyn Kelly, the Fox anchor, who will co-host the debate. Ms Kelly is a “bimbo”, according to Mr Trump, who is incapable of objectivity when there is “blood coming out of her whatever”.

So that is settled. Mr Trump thinks the menstrual cycle is a handicap. He also recoils at other female bodily functions. When Mrs Clinton took a bathroom break at a recent Democratic debate, Mr Trump described her as “disgusting”. He used the same word about an opposing lawyer in a 2011 hearing when she asked for a short break to pump breast milk. Looks are also fair game. Among those attacked for their appearance are the actress Bette Midler (“extremely unattractive”), Angelina Jolie (“she’s been with so many guys she makes me look like a baby”), media figure Arianna Huffington (“unattractive both inside and out”), fellow Republican candidate Carly Fiorina (“look at that face. Would anyone vote for that?”) and comedian Rosie O’Donnell (“fat pig”).

None of which has done Mr Trump’s ratings any harm. The more controversial a celebrity, the bigger audiences they attract. The question is whether there is any longer a meaningful distinction between show business and US politics. Do ratings equal votes?•

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“Call It Unreality TV”

January 22, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, a mix of Mussolini and QVC host, is loathsome to different people for different reasons. 

Take good people for instance: They despise Trump because he’s a lying, egotistical, demeaning, manipulative, racist, xenophobic, sexist misery. There are coke dealers who are more honest. The man is a human waste product.

Now let’s consider terrible people like Glenn Beck and L. Brent Bozell III: They abhor Trump because he isn’t “legitimately conservative.” Well, that’s true, but it probably should be at least #453 on the list of reasons to not support him. That would be like Democrats saying that John Wilkes Booth wasn’t a good representative of their party because of his questionable stance on land taxes. Of course, you can’t expect much from Beck, a cynical salesman of gold-plated bunkers, or Bozell, who once referred to President Obama as looking like a “skinny ghetto crackhead.”

Those shitbags are two of the right-wingers enlisted for a National Review “Against Trump” cover story. In all fairness, some of the essayists do make a moral case as well against hideous hotelier. From Mona Charen:

In December, Public Policy Polling found that 36 percent of Republican voters for whom choosing the candidate “most conservative on the issues” was the top priority said they supported Donald Trump. We can talk about whether he is a boor (“My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well documented, are various other parts of my body”), a creep (“If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her”), or a louse (he tried to bully an elderly woman, Vera Coking, out of her house in Atlantic City because it stood on a spot he wanted to use as a garage). But one thing about which there can be no debate is that Trump is no conservative—he’s simply playing one in the primaries. Call it unreality TV.

Put aside for a moment Trump’s countless past departures from conservative principle on defense, racial quotas, abortion, taxes, single-payer health care, and immigration. (That’s right: In 2012, he derided Mitt Romney for being too aggressive on the question, and he’s made extensive use of illegal-immigrant labor in his serially bankrupt businesses.) The man has demonstrated an emotional immaturity bordering on personality disorder, and it ought to disqualify him from being a mayor, to say nothing of a commander-in-chief.

Trump has made a career out of egotism, while conservatism implies a certain modesty about government. The two cannot mix.

Who, except a pitifully insecure person, needs constantly to insult and belittle others including, or perhaps especially, women? Where is the center of gravity in a man who in May denounces those who “needlessly provoke” Muslims and in December proposes that we (“temporarily”) close our borders to all non-resident Muslims? If you don’t like a Trump position, you need only wait a few months, or sometimes days. In September, he advised that we “let Russia fight ISIS.” In November, after the Paris massacre, he discovered that “we’re going to have to knock them out and knock them out hard.” A pinball is more predictable.

Is Trump a liberal? Who knows? He played one for decades — donating to liberal causes and politicians (including Al Sharpton) and inviting Hillary Clinton to his (third) wedding. Maybe it was all a game, but voters who care about conservative ideas and principles must ask whether his recent impersonation of a conservative is just another role he’s playing. When a con man swindles you, you can sue—as many embittered former Trump associates who thought themselves ill used have done. When you elect a con man, there’s no recourse.•

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“Old Man Trump Knows Just How Much Racial Hate He Stirred Up”

January 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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It’s not all bad news for Track Palin in the wake of his domestic violence charges. The Yankees just offered him a contract.

After Sarah Palin’s asinine attempt yesterday to blame President Obama for her son’s recent arrest, it made me wonder if Obama was also responsible for Track’s alleged legal problems from a decade ago, before he enlisted. The Palin boy must have been suffering from (PTSD) Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

In the usual perplexing Palin fashion, she accused Obama of “not supporting the troops” as she was endorsing Donald Trump, the only national American politician in memory to actually demean the troops. How perfect.

More Trump news: In an excellent Gawker post by Will Kaufman, the writer dug through the Woody Guthrie Archives to find documents about the songwriter’s painful period in the 1950s living in a Beach Haven building owned by the Trump paterfamilias, Fred. It speaks to a real-estate empire built, in part, on racism.

An excerpt:

‘Old Man Trump’s’ color line

Only a year into his Beach Haven residency, Guthrie – himself a veteran – was already lamenting the bigotry that pervaded his new, lily-white neighborhood, which he’d taken to calling “Bitch Havens.”

In his notebooks, he conjured up a scenario of smashing the color line to transform the Trump complex into a diverse cornucopia, with “a face of every bright color laffing and joshing in these old darkly weeperish empty shadowed windows.” He imagined himself calling out in Whitman-esque free verse to the “negro girl yonder that walks along against this headwind / holding onto her purse and her fur coat”:

I welcome you here to live. I welcome you and your man both here to Beach Haven to love in any ways you please and to have some kind of a decent place to get pregnant in and to have your kids raised up in. I’m yelling out my own welcome to you.

For Guthrie, Fred Trump came to personify all the viciousness of the racist codes that continued to put decent housing – both public and private – out of reach for so many of his fellow citizens:

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project ….

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“Her Embrace Of Mr. Trump Also Has A Biblical Subtext”

January 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Sarah Palin’s halting, incoherent endorsement speech for Donald Trump is the sort of thing that usually comes from the mouth of a nativist stroke victim, a fan of medicines or an imbecile. Sometimes all three at the same time.

It’s amusing that Palin, who’s always pretended to be a great supporter of American troops and has repeatedly excoriated President Obama, even today, for not showing them enough respect (though he always does), is now an ardent advocate of the only national American politician in recent memory (ever?) to mock our service people. What makes it worse is Trump, who requested multiple military deferments and has never seen a bunker that wasn’t on a golf course, ridiculed the extreme sacrifice of the very person, John McCain, who made Palin’s ascendency possible.

From Edward Luce at the Financial Times:

To chants of “USA, USA”, America’s best known hockey Mom briefly stole the limelight during the 2008 election before embarking on a career as a conservative entertainer. Her 2016 comeback, which she kicked off with an endorsement of Donald Trump on Tuesday, may turn out the same. Should Mr Trump becomes the next US president, Ms Palin could be his secretary of energy (as he has promised). Failing that, she will return to her life in Alaska as a fading social media star.

Yet her embrace of Mr Trump also has a biblical subtext. Ms Palin was John the Baptist to Mr Trump’s Jesus. Years before Mr Trump trashed conventional wisdom by boosting his poll numbers with gaffes, Ms Palin had patented that style of campaigning. The more tongue-tied Ms Palin seemed, the more intensely her supporters backed her. The more the media mocked her, the more her fanbase exulted. Mr Trump has elevated that approach into an art form. In an age when knowledge is a mark of elitism, ignorance is power. It is also great marketing.

During the 2008 campaign, Ms Palin famously could not think of a single newspaper title she read. She also failed to recall the name of a founding father. Likewise, she was pilloried for citing Alaska’s proximity to Russia as evidence of her foreign policy credentials. The more derision Ms Palin suffered, the greater her heartland appeal. This is how Ms Palin’s “teachers, and teamsters, and cops and cooks, and stay-at-home Moms,” also felt. Mr Trump has collected Ms Palin’s hockey puck and skated on with it. When he betrayed ignorance of the “nuclear triad” in a recent debate, experts were floored. How could someone auditioning to be commander-in-chief be unaware of America’s three nuclear delivery platforms? Mr Trump’s admission did him no harm. His supporters knew how it felt to be the butt of liberal sneering.

Ms Palin’s endorsement also highlights a lesser known breach — that between “movement” conservatives who tend to be more ideological and generally back Ted Cruz in Iowa, and Mr Trump’s more populist fan base.•

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“My Gut Tells Me Things Are Changing For The Worse”

January 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, the Kim Jong-un of casino bankruptcy, had largely played footsie with Ted Cruz even while excoriating all other GOP hopefuls. That changed recently, however, when the two most detestable of all the candidates began throwing haymakers at one another. Amusing to hear Trump play the likability card with Cruz, since the former Apprentice host has tried to not only connect with members of the 4-H club but also those in the 3-K club.

The most telling line of the entire GOP race was spoken before Trump and Cruz were torn asunder, when they still resisted attacking one another. The aspiring potentate said this of his Texan-Canadian competitor: “Everything I say, he agrees with me. No matter what I say.” It was a tacit acknowledgement by Trump that he knew he was spouting crazy shit because he thought it would resonate with nativist voters he needed to float his cockamamie campaign.

Largely it has, at least with a sizable-enough swath of a frayed and divided party. It’s been the Reality TV version of the political season, full of disgraceful taunts and pathetic posturing, and the question is if the show gets cancelled in Iowa and New Hampshire or if the season is sadly extended.

From Edward Luce’s Financial Times column about the approaching American hour of reckoning:

Returning to America after a trip, I encountered a chatty immigration officer. “You guys should have finished off the crusades when you had the chance,” he said as he handed back my British passport. In themselves such encounters mean little. But I have had many similar ones recently — and the plural of anecdote is data, as they say.

Within the next three weeks, we shall find out if the rise of Donald Trump is silly season froth that comes before voting, or whether we are in the midst of a dramatic upheaval in US politics. My head is agnostic. But my gut tells me things are changing for the worse. Either way, the time for speculation is nearly over.

The rest of the world is almost as obsessed about America’s political health as the US. Every time I have been abroad in the past few months, people ask the same question: “Could Donald Trump be president?” The answer is probably not. But it comes with a strict health warning. More seasoned observers have been wrong about US politics in the past year and show few signs of lifting their batting average.

In spite of that, the consensus holds that Mr Trump will not be the Republican nominee. Should he become so, he would lose the presidential election. If, by some miracle, he won it, he would make a disastrous president. The next question is: “What is fuelling Mr Trump’s popularity?” (And for better informed foreigners, that of Ted Cruz too.) This is the issue that matters most.•

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“Inside The White House, Poetic Justice Looks A Lot Like Donald Trump”

December 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Jealous President Obama is on Bear Grylls’ reality TV show, Donald Trump is building an internment camp for Shahs of Sunset.

America’s vulgar tweetbag may not be what the entire country deserves, but he sure is what the GOP has coming. For seven years, Republicans have obstructed the President and become a protest party, making immigration reform, to name one issue, impossible, allowing what should have been a moot point in 2015 to instead be the talking point. And the demographics don’t look kindly upon the nature that conversation has taken on. The GOP, in a sense, has turned itself and its voters into refugees, searching for a United States that no longer exists.

From Edward-Isaac Dovere at Politico:

Inside the White House, poetic justice looks a lot like Donald Trump.

Past and present aides to President Barack Obama are gloating that a Republican leadership they say defined itself by blustery opposition — and used it to win the House, then the Senate, and stand in the White House’s way at every turn — is getting devoured by a candidate personifying the anger agenda.

Obama insiders would rather have immigration reform signed than lament knowingly on Sunday talk shows that the Republicans will keep losing elections until they deal with the issue. They’d rather have a longer-term approach to government spending, or more of the entitlement and tax reform deals Obama said he was eager to cut.

But on everything from guns to reproductive health to opening up Cuba, Obama’s team says it has been battling for years the very politics that paved the way for Trump’s ascendance this election cycle.

“It’s not so much a reaction to Obama,” said one person familiar with the president’s thinking about the Trump phenomenon. “It’s more of a reaction to their strategy that, ‘We’re just going to be antithetical to everything [Obama] stands for.’”

According to people in the White House, Obama doesn’t talk about Trump much. When he does, it’s with a combination of amusement and disgust at the rhetoric, occasionally mentioning his amazement at GOP leaders’ inability to understand Trump’s supporters and the long-term damage the president thinks Trump is doing to the party with the groups of voters who will decide future elections.•

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“At Least He’s A Leader”

December 18, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, the pre-diabetic potentate of Apartheid America, is impressed with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who’s rule has made his country stink worse than Lenin’s corpse. “At least he’s a leader,” says America’s aspiring flabby strongman, which is like saying that at least the captain of the Titanic was a “steerer.”

From Colin Campbell at Business Insider:

Scarborough pointed to Putin’s status as a notorious strongman.

“Well, I mean, it’s also a person who kills journalists, political opponents, and invades countries. Obviously that would be a concern, would it not?” Scarborough asked.

“He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader,” Trump replied. “Unlike what we have in this country.”

“But again: He kills journalists that don’t agree with him,” Scarborough said.

The Republican presidential front-runner said there was “a lot of killing going on” around the world and then suggested that Scarborough had asked him a different question.

“I think our country does plenty of killing, also, Joe, so, you know,” Trump replied. “There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, Joe. A lot of killing going on. A lot of stupidity. And that’s the way it is. But you didn’t ask me [that] question, you asked me a different question. So that’s fine.”

Scarborough was left visibly stunned.•

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“Is America Turning Into A Game-Show Democracy?”

December 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

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As far as I can tell, Edward Luce of the Financial Times was the first to argue that even should Donald Trump’s candidacy dissolve, the hatred he unloosed would remain. It was waiting for agency, and the GOP opportunist–or worse yet, hatemonger–supplied it. Now it’s here for the long haul, regardless of who’s the eventual nominee.

In Luce’s latest column, he pens a letter to America in the guise of Joe Biden, appealing to the fading American middle class to say no to their worst impulses. He wonders if U.S. politics is merely a reality show now, accepting of a bachelor who hands out only thorns. An excerpt:

Fellow Americans, we are in danger of electing someone who could do great damage to our country. When fear takes over, humans forget reason. Since 9/11 almost a quarter of a million Americans have died in gun violence. Thousands were children. Some of them were gunned down in their classrooms. We did not call these acts of terrorism. Don’t misunderstand me. I am not suggesting we take away everyone’s guns. I am realistic. But you should know that your chances of being killed in everyday gun violence are several thousand times greater than dying from terrorism on US soil. Forty Americans have been killed by terrorists since 9/11. We need to keep our sense of perspective.

Who are we? Is America turning into a game-show democracy that can be manipulated to laugh and cry and boo on a whim by the host with trophy wives? Are we the kind of people who would close our shutters to a fifth of the world and two per cent of our law-abiding citizens? Would we set up a police state so that we could round up 11m Mexicans? Is that who we are?•

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“He Harnessed Feelings That Long Predated His Candidacy”

December 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, who’s cheating on his third wife with a veal parm, doesn’t really want to win the Republican nomination, but he also doesn’t want to not win it. That would be a loss.

The most important matter at hand isn’t whether Beefsteak Charlie is really in it for good, but rather that he’s appealed to the worst of us, stoked vile hatred that will survive him. When Trump supporters tell you that they’re tired of being forced to be politically correct, what they really mean is they feel like they can’t say racist things without retribution anymore, something that once was possible.

Adding to the fury is the seismic financial and demographic shifts that the former white working class is enduring. That economic decline is the result of many factors, among them the tax codes instituted by those GOP pols who claimed to champion them. They’ve been let down, and now with Trump’s assistance they’ll let loose, and many who are not to blame will be blamed.

From Anand Giridharadas at the New York Times:

About half of Trump supporters in North Carolina and in New Hampshire want to “see the mosques in the country shut down.” In the North Carolina poll, only one-quarter of Trump supporters said they thought Islam should even be legal in the United States; 44 percent thought not.

This suggests that there is an enormous constituency favoring this set of (probably unconstitutional) ideas, despite the fact that they have been rejected by most of the American political class. Trump didn’t generate this constituency with a few brash statements. He harnessed feelings that long predated his candidacy — feelings of besiegement and alienation, of being silenced — and gave them an unprecedented respectability. Even if Trump leaves the stage by springtime, he has galvanized, gathered and given voice to all these Americans.

America is living through an era of dramatic changes: its demographics shifting, its middle class contracting, its institutions grappling with the pressures of the networked age. Trump isn’t winning those Americans who tend to experience this change as a tailwind. But he has enthralled millions who experience it as a headwind, and his relentless campaign against “political correctness” has given voice to their fears: about terrorism; about a country passing into new hands, with the attendant loss of privileges and certainties; about a democracy that will never solve problems if we cannot call radical Islam radical Islam. This anti-P.C. sentiment, so vital to Trump’s brand, is often minimized on the left as simple intolerance. But the longing for less-muzzled debates is to many on the right what campaign finance is to many on the left: the issue we must solve to be able to solve any other issue.

This is how Trumpism might outlast Trump — by gelling this anxiety and longing into a movement, by giving a new permission to question who is American, by redrawing the borders of respectable debate.•

 

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“The Ku Klux Klan Is Using Donald Trump As A Talking Point In Its Outreach Efforts”

December 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, a gout-ish dummkopf who makes Juggalos wince, has no interest in being President, a position that requires commitment, foresight and maturity, qualities he sorely lacks. He jumped into the race impetuously during one of his many glucose spikes, demanding attention for his man-baby ego, and has been unable to disqualify himself from the odious GOP race no matter how disgraceful his behavior. The fledgling fascist will just have to keep upping the ante as he tries to dream up some exit from the trail.

Early in the campaign, Edward Luce of the Financial Times made a prediction already realized: The miserable mogul may accomplish an egress after sullying the season, but the hatred he stirs up isn’t going anywhere.

From Ben Schreckinger at Politico:

The Ku Klux Klan is using Donald Trump as a talking point in its outreach efforts. Stormfront, the most prominent American white supremacist website, is upgrading its servers in part to cope with a Trump traffic spike. And former Louisiana Rep. David Duke reports that the businessman has given more Americans cover to speak out loud about white nationalism than at any time since his own political campaigns in the 1990s.

As hate group monitors at the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League warn that Trump’s rhetoric is conducive to anti-Muslim violence, white nationalist leaders are capitalizing on his candidacy to invigorate and expand their movement.

“Demoralization has been the biggest enemy and Trump is changing all that,” said Stormfront founder Don Black, who reports additional listeners and call volume to his phone-in radio show, in addition to the site’s traffic bump. Black predicts that the white nationalist forces set in motion by Trump will be a legacy that outlives the businessman’s political career.•

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“Some Wonder Whether The Media’s Treatment Of Trump As An Entertaining Curiosity Allowed His Haphazard Campaign To Coalesce”

December 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, a colostomy bag dipped in bronzer, is a bully with scant self-awareness who needs to be reminded who he is in the most frank terms. It didn’t stun me that the favored son of a privileged family (Hi, Jeb!) didn’t know how to disarm a bully. He hasn’t had the practice. It did shock me, though, when in the wake of disgraceful comments about Mexicans at the outset of his campaign that he was treated by the media as merely a harmless joke. A joke, okay, but someone making fascistic comments isn’t funny. Aspiring despots often initially come across as vulgar clowns. You deal with them early and often.

The interview that peeved me most early on was conducted by Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, who matched the hideous hotelier in buffoonery when she portrayed him as a somewhat naughty great-uncle instead of a deeply bigoted demagogue. The Economist Q&A that followed in its wake was likewise far too friendly, if not as clueless. Not even Trump mocking POWs and the disabled was enough to fully stifle the press guffaws. It’s taken talk of a Muslim ban and internment camps to finally awaken some commentators. This poor journalistic performance isn’t necessarily responsible for Trump’s ascension in the polls, but it’s poor, nonetheless.

From Kia Makarechi at Vanity Fair:

Trump on Tuesday abruptly canceled a pre-planned interview with Yahoo’s Katie Couric. The interview was previously scheduled for Wednesday. He has also generally increased his rhetoric on the media, which he regularly describes as mostly made up of “scum.” At Monday’s rally, he described an NBC reporter in the crowd as “third-rate,” and encouraged the audience to boo her.

These changes come amid much hand-wringing within the media itself. Journalists have noted repeatedly in recent weeks that Trump appears to be completely resistant to fact-checking. He bandies about the false claim that he saw New Jersey Muslims celebrate the 9/11 attacks on TV, despite being rebuked by former officials and fact-checkers. Coverage of prior shocking incidents has generally corresponded with a bump in his poll numbers. Some wonder whether the media’s treatment of Trump as an entertaining curiosity allowed his haphazard campaign to coalesce into a viable candidacy, but that’s a hard claim to prove or disprove. 

The Morning Joe snafu and [Arianna] Huffington’s change of heart might indicate a souring mood, but they’re hardly cutting the air off of Trump’s visibility. CNN carried Trump’s Monday night rally live. Fox News’s Greta van Susteren interviewed him shortly after his proposal was published. In addition to his nearly 30-minute Morning Joe appearance, Trump also called into Good Morning America on Tuesday.

The idea that Trump has suddenly crossed some decency line is also tenuous: the man built his campaign for the White House on half-truths and impossible-to-enact proposals.•

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“Donald Trump Is A Self-Made Person”

December 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Donald Trump, an airborne pathogen lodged in America’s small intestine continually forcing the country to violently go No. 2 in its pants, is apparently popular in the bellwether Vigo County of Indiana, at least based on research conducted by Adam Wren of Politico. The Terre Haute community is a place with eerily prescient abilities for selecting American Presidents Republican or Democrat, Dubya or Obama. According to the article, the county’s unbridled passion for the fascist fathead is based almost entirely on false assumptions about the GOP candidate. Trump as a good business person? Trump the self-made man? Holy fuck. 

If the people in Vigo really think the country is a disaster, which they seem to, it might behoove them to realize that since they’ve almost always picked the winning candidate, they’re as much to blame as anyone.

An excerpt:

The people gathered at Grand Traverse weren’t the political neophytes and gadflies often chalked up as Trump voters. They were the kind of people who scuttled their Thursday night plans to come to a two-hour event organized by a low-key Republican county chairman. And if the Republican primary were held on this evening, and limited to Politics and Pies attendees, Trump would win, and handily.

Take Dick and Jane Ames, both 72, for example. The retired air traffic controller and insurance agent who met when they were in high school here are sold on Trump. “He said what I want to hear, and I believe him,” Jane said. “He’s such a good business person, and we need that.” (She did admit, though, that Rubio has a “a cute smile.”)

Dick said he’s not afraid to vote for a Democrat. He voted for Kennedy, after all.

“He voted for Jackie,” Jane said.

“I did,” Dick said.

But for Dick, 2016 is different. “Democrats don’t have anybody. One’s a communist, and Clinton should be in jail.”

And then there was 17-year-old Jared Potts, who wore gray contacts that turned his pupils into pinholes, who will turn 18 next September, and plans to vote for Trump in his first election in November. “He speaks his mind, and I think that might be what the country needs,” he said. “A lot of the presidents don’t really enforce what needs to happen, they just do whatever the country feels like. Other countries just say, ‘do this, do that.’ Trump is just like, ‘no, I want this.’ He doesn’t owe anybody anything. Marco Rubio is paid for. Donald Trump is a self-made person.”•

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“Pundits, Even Conservative Ones, Say That Trump Resembles A Fascist”

November 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Donald Trump possesses the realpolitik of Mayor McCheese and the big-picture vision of David Duke.

You certainly don’t want to believe that the majority of Americans would vote for a vicious bigot who’s smeared POWs, women, disabled people, Mexicans, African-Americans and Muslims. But Trump certainly has found a base: Voters who feel like their sense of privilege is under siege. It is, of course, but not the way they think it is, not from terrorists from the Middle East or laborers from south of the border. Globalization, automation and tax codes that favor the wealthy have devastated the American middle class, largely white and now red in the face. The postwar redistribution of wealth through taxes is long gone, given way to loopholes that favor the inheritors, the land grabbers, the Trumps.

“They seem so nice, your friends and neighbors. Your fellow Americans,” writes Molly Ball in a smart and lucid Atlantic piece about the fear of falling and the rise of bigotry, even fascism, in U.S. Presidential politics. An excerpt:

Four months into his crazed foray into presidential politics, Trump is still winning this thing. And what could once be dismissed as a larkish piece of political performance art has seemingly turned into something darker. Pundits, even conservative ones, say that Trump resembles a fascist. The recent terrorist attacks in Paris, which some hoped would expose Trump’s shallowness, have instead strengthened him by intensifying people’s anger and fear. Trump has falsely claimed that thousands of Muslims cheered the 9/11 attacks from rooftops in New Jersey; he has declined to rule out a national database of Muslims. The other day, a reporter asked Trump if the things he was proposing weren’t just like what the Nazis did to the Jews. Trump replied, “You tell me.”

Some observers still think Trump’s support might be soft. Trump has dipped in the polls a couple of times, after a listless debate performance, for example. Perhaps the people who first glommed on to his celebrity got bored and drifted away. But if so, they didn’t find anybody else they liked. And they came back. And now, they are not leaving.

“I have got my mind made up, pretty much so,” says Michael Barnhill, a 67-year-old factory supervisor with a leathery complexion and yellow teeth. “The fact is, politicians have not done anything for our country in a lot of years.”

These people are not confused. They are sticking with Trump, the only candidate who gets it, who is man enough to show the enemy who’s boss.•

 

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“‘War’ Is Exactly The Term IS Would Most Eagerly Choose”

November 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, a Fraggle Rock puppet inspired by Mussolini, has won favor in polls for his loose usage of dangerous words and both vague and specific threats, not directing them only at American enemies but also at Americans.

He’s spoken recklessly of oil wars and such, despite draft deferments that kept him personally far from any bunker that wasn’t situated on a golf course. An Economist essay looks at the many uses of the word “war,” including its troubling application in regards to the Islamic State. An excerpt:

War in its canonical form has state armies on a battlefield trying to control territory. Most of today’s shooting wars are not even that clean cut—America has not declared one officially since the second world war. But worse, politicians have been unable to resist the temptation to declare war on things like poverty (Lyndon Johnson), drugs (Ronald Reagan) or terrorism (George Bush).

Declaring such “wars” is a problem because such a war on a concept is unwinnable: poverty and drugs will never show up and sign a surrender document on the battleshipMissouri, as Imperial Japan did in 1945 to end the second world war. Did Johnson defeat poverty? Did Reagan defeat drugs? We certainly know that Mr Bush did not defeat terrorism.

What about declaring war on Islamic State (IS), presumed by all to be behind the Paris massacres?  “War” is exactly the term IS would most eagerly choose. Wars are fought by armies belonging to states—just what the Islamic State fancies itself. In reality, the territory controlled by ISIS—the “caliphate”—has some elements of a state, with everything from fighting  forces to rudimentary social services, but it is unrecognised, claiming territory other states have a legitimate claim to. IS’s claim to state status is dubious. Mr Hollande runs the risk of raising that status when he calls eight men with guns and small bombs capable of “an act of war” against a nuclear power.•

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“We’re Going To Have To Do Things That We Never Did Before”

November 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Fascist Twinkie hoarder Donald Trump, who boasts with the desperation of a man in possession of the world’s smallest micropenis, often says that he’s going to “have to look at a lot of things” when asked for specifics about his policies should he become President. That’s his way of trying to make it sound like he’s not an impetuous, adult baby who has no idea what he’s talking about and is too lazy to conduct basic research.

When it comes to doing “regretfully” unpleasant things to people who are not very white, he is definitely going to have to look at a lot of things. Nipple clamps? Cattle prods? Internment camps? Well, they are the linchpins of democracy.

In Hunter Walker’s Yahoo! Politics piece, Trump not only serves up Torquemada-esque talking points, but the skank even has the lack of self-awareness to mention Monica Lewinsky. An excerpt:

Yahoo News asked Trump whether his push for increased surveillance of American Muslims could include warrantless searches. He suggested he would consider a series of drastic measures.

“We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule,” Trump said. “And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”

Yahoo News asked Trump whether this level of tracking might require registering Muslims in a database or giving them a form of special identification that noted their religion. He wouldn’t rule it out.

“We’re going to have to — we’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely,” Trump said when presented with the idea. “We’re going to have to look at the mosques. We’re going to have to look very, very carefully.”•

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