Far too much media coverage of politics focuses on the horserace angle--who's ahead, who's behind, who's up or down. It relies on false equivalency: if Politician A says X, then the reporter goes to Politician B, who's sure to say Y. That's lazy journalism, and it doesn't actually inform the public about which position (if any) is actually true, or adheres to the facts as we know them. At TWiA, our mission is to discuss politics through the prism of policy--to look, in other words, at the real-world implications of the things that politicians say and do, to make connections others might miss, and to explain it all in language a lay person can understand. Also to offer suggestions of how you can help somebody in need, to report on what's awesome, and to keep tabs on bears. If you like TWiA, share or repost or tell a friend, and be sure to leave comments, even if they're arguments. Especially if they're arguments.
This Week in Louisiana
The Red Cross has labeled the flooding in Louisiana the "worst natural disaster since Superstorm Sandy." It didn't even come from a named storm, just a megastorm, the likes of which we're likely to see more and more of as the climate keeps warming. Here are some heart-rending photos, and some statistics about the scale of the tragedy.
Donald Trump visited the flood zone last week, despite a request from Louisiana's governor, Democrat John Bel Edwards, not to come. Trump's campaign said he was coming to "help," and that his visit would be private, with no press. Of course, that didn't happen; the press was there, and caught all 49 seconds of the time Trump spent "helping" unload boxes of Play-Doh from a truck. It should be pointed out that in the wake of such a devastating event, Play-Doh is hardly the first need of the affected citizens. The truck held other supplies that will be more helpful. It's unclear whether the donations came from Trump personally, from his campaign, or from some other source. What is known is that Trump is writing a $100,000 check, supposedly a charitable donation but in fact a donation to a church connected to an organization labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, run by anti-gay hatemonger Tony Perkins. What Perkins will use it for is anyone's guess, but his house was damaged by the flood, so look for some home repairs.
The trouble with a president or a presidential candidate arriving at a disaster scene while rescue and cleanup operations are underway is that those people are protected by the Secret Service. In advance of any such visit, the Secret Service pulls large numbers of local law enforcement personnel away from their regular duties to clear the area to be visited. While the candidate or official is on the scene, law enforcement has to clear roadways and provide crowd control. All those things are fine during ordinary times, but in the aftermath of a major disaster, the locals have better things to do. Trump's visit was a photo op, intended to make him look like an upstanding citizen, but he could just as easily have sent the supplies without showing up himself to spend less than a minute unloading it.
President Obama took a lot of heat for waiting until Tuesday of this week to visit, but in fact, that's what you do if you're a responsible person, more interested in substance than in photo ops. The president--while on vacation last week--was deeply involved in the federal response. FEMA has been on the scene since the beginning, and FEMA is a much more effective organization that it was under the previous administration, when its response to Hurricane Katrina was so wretchedly botched.
Of course, the underlying issue here is climate change. The president, and Hillary Clinton, see climate change as an unfolding crisis that must be addressed. Trump sees it as a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, who somehow enlisted the cooperation of 97% of the world's climate scientists. Given that view, a President Trump would be delivering Play-Doh and writing checks to bigots on a regular basis.
Meanwhile, conservatives continue to push for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, to the point of calling for a constitutional convention to draft one. The balanced budget is the worst idea in politics, but conservatives have an ideological fealty to it that overrules the many practical reasons not to do it. The federal government needs the flexibility to deal with disasters like Katrina, Sandy, and now this flooding. It also needs to be able to respond to recessions by increasing spending and hiring. Balanced budgets at the state level lead to ridiculous maneuvers like selling off state-owned buildings, then paying rent to keep occupying them, closing parks and libraries, shortening school years, etc. At the federal level, requiring a balanced budget would be catastrophic.
If you want to help the Louisiana flood victims, there's a list of organizations doing good work here. If you want to help in future disasters, never vote for anyone who supports a federal balanced budget amendment.
Much more below the fold, including guns, scandals, Head Start, and bears!
TWiA explores the intersection of policy and politics, and most importantly, how that intersection affects real people. It's dedicated to the proposition that good government is possible, it matters, and taxpayers deserve nothing less. Its starting point is that facts are facts, science is real, data are real, and we can and must learn from history. Below you'll find facts and opinions that derive from fact, informed by a close and careful study of these issues that began in 1968 and has never stopped. Note, when we discuss generic "Democrats" and "Republicans" or "conservatives" and "liberals," etc., we're generally talking about elected officials, unless otherwise noted. Also, bonus bear news and other awesomeness. We appreciate comments and arguments, so please chime in, and if you like it, spread the word.
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This Week in Media
A common fallacy is employed to explain the rise of the right-wing media. Mass media, it's said, is liberal, so a dedicatedly conservative alternative had to be created. The truth is considerably more complex: most mass media was based on the coasts, which tend to be more cosmopolitan and socially liberal than the "fly-over country" of America's middle. As a result, some writers for the big newspapers, and some network anchors, were liberal. What was left out of that equation was that they worked for giant corporations, which tend to be interested largely in increased corporate profits and lower corporate taxes. There was always an ideological tug-of-war between the very rich people running those media outlets and the less-wealthy people doing the actual reporting. There's also the not-insignificant fact that simply by reporting the truth, they're taking the side of progressivism to some extent, because some things are just reality: the climate is warming, tax cuts don't spur economic growth, women and blacks and gays and Muslims deserve the same rights as white male Americans, etc.
Regardless, there's an important difference between the conservative media and real journalism, and it's demonstrated by two of the biggest political stories this week.
The first is Donald Trump's campaign staff shakeup. Trump has demoted Paul Manafort (whose dealings on behalf of pro-Russian forces in Ukraine have made him a lot of money, generated a lot of damaging headlines this week, and might yet land Manafort in prison) (UPDATE: On Friday morning, just before our deadline, Manafort quit the campaign.) and added a new campaign "chief executive" and a new campaign manager. The campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, is a long-time political pollster, a far-right pro (far-right, but not alt-right) who knows her way around the political fringe Trump like. But the chief executive is something else entirely. He's Stephen Bannon, who's taking a leave of absence from running right-wing "news" organization Breitbart.com to help elect Trump president.
In fact, he's been working toward that goal for months yet, without any cash reward (that we know of; several Breitbart staffers believe there have, in fact, been payments made by Trump in return for positive coverage) from Trump. Now the relationship is formalized. Bannon works directly for Trump. When the campaign is over, he goes back to running Breitbart. Everybody who works at Breitbart knows it, just as they've known all along that their jobs depended on producing headlines favorable to the boss's main man. Remember, when former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski angrily grabbed a Breitbart reporter's arm, instead of standing by its employee, Breitbart threw her under the bus and sided with Trump and Lewandowski. The reporter, Michelle Fields, resigned, and several other Breitbart employees went with her. Those who stayed were under no illusions about which side the bread was buttered on.
It's never been easy to confuse Breitbart with a real news organization. From the beginning, it's been about right-wing activism disguised as news, and any real journalism committed there has been accidental, not intentional.
The same is true--has always been true--of Fox "News." Anyone with doubts should simply look at the revolving door between Fox and Republican politicians: Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Newt Gingrich are just a few of the big names who've had shows on Fox. There's no corresponding list of Democratic politicians with shows on MSNBC, CNN, or any of the networks, because it just doesn't happen. Political operatives get shows sometimes, after leaving politics--former Bill Clinton staffer George Stephanopolous on ABC is a good example--but they don't go back and forth between "news" and politics. In real news organizations, "conflict of interest" isn't just a catchphrase, but in right-wing media, it's a way of life.
If you want to know what a Trump campaign will look like with Bannon running things, just imagine it like it is now, only with even more ugliness and outright racism. According to a Southern Poverty Law Center (full disclosure--TWiA is a longtime financial contributor to SPLC) piece about Breitbart.com:
Over the past year however, the outlet has undergone a noticeable shift toward embracing ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right. Racist ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas –– all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the “Alt-Right.”
The Alt-Right is a loose set of far-right ideologies at the core of which is a belief that “white identity” is under attack through policies prioritizing multiculturalism, political correctness and social justice and must be preserved, usually through white-identified online communities and physical ethno-states.
SPLC continues:
Over the past year the media outlet has been openly promoting the core issues of the Alt-Right, introducing these racist ideas to its readership – much to the delight of many in the white nationalist world who could never dream of reaching such a vast number of people.
Breitbart has always given a platform to parts of the radical right, most notably elements of the organized anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant movements. Breitbart has also organized conferences featuring nativist speakers and published op-eds and interviews with movement leaders. But since 2015, Breitbart began publishing more overtly racist diatribes about Muslims and immigrants.
That's the intellectual and moral sewer Trump's campaign is descending into. Brace yourself; it's gonna get nasty.
The second case in point this week is Roger Ailes, who left Fox less than a month ago, thanks to Gretchen Carlson coming forward--followed by legions of other female Fox employees--to detail Ailes's slimy on-the-job lechery. Trump excused his behavior by saying that Ailes had helped their careers, which might be true but is no excuse for sexual harassment. Now Ailes is advising Trump, helping him prepare for the debates (at least one of which could be moderated by Fox personnel, all of which will be aired on Fox). Some are saying that his role will expand beyond debate prep. Notably, according to New York Times reporting, "It was not clear when Mr. Ailes began helping the campaign."
It's highly unlikely that Ailes will ever have another job in media, but it's also perfectly clear that he built Fox as a propaganda wing of the Republican Party. Before helping to found Fox "News," he worked as a media consultant to president's Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, and Fox was a natural outgrowth of that job--an entire TV "news" channel devoted to furthering the Republican cause. Fox as an organization has bent over backwards to support Trump's candidacy, and now Ailes is being rewarded for his loyalty.
Nobody who gets "news" from Fox or Breitbart should operate under the illusion that they're getting actual news. That's not the function of these organizations. They exist to spread the conservative gospel, to foment conspiracy theories, to deny the truth that the mainstream press specializes in. Fox calling itself "fair and balanced" is like Trump's "believe me"--a signal that whatever's coming next is a lie.
Side Note 1: The alternate theory floating around out there is that Bannon and Ailes have both been brought into the Trump inner circle because they represent Trump's real goal--not winning an election, but after his spectacular flameout, creating a far-far-right media organization with himself as the figurehead. Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor, writes, "“If Trump loses, Bannon could head up a new media empire with Trump’s support and the involvement of new Trump supporter and ousted former Fox News head Roger Ailes. Look for Sean Hannity to be a part of any such endeavor.” Brian Stelter of CNN agrees: "Think about who he has on his team now. Steve Bannon, Roger Ailes informally, Roger Stone … He has all the right people to put in place a new media company, whether it's a television network or on Facebook or something we can't picture yet. … We have to at least consider that possibility.”
Side Note 2: Our use of "Breitbart" above reflects the current leadership of the website Breitbart.com. The site is named for the late Andrew Breitbart, who didn't build it as a news organization but as an activist site pushing right-wing ideas, supporting misleadingly edited video "investigations," and the like. While we considered Andrew Breitbart dishonest and intellectually flawed, but he wasn't a racist, to our knowledge. It's under Bannon's leadership that Breitbart.com has reached out to the white nationalist movement, the "alt-right," with bigoted, racist, anti-Semitic overtures. The site has grown in popularity and profitability under Bannon, but at the cost of the original Breitbart's reputation and any sense of decency it might once have had.
Much more below the fold, including terror, good news, squids, and bears!
TWiA for three weeks in a row is nowhere near a record--but for the last few months, it's something we've been unable to achieve. How long will it last? Your guess is as good as ours.
This Week in Gun Safety
We're determined not to make TWiA all Donald Trump, all the time. That's what the 24-hour cable news channels are for.
But that doesn't mean we can ignore every outrage that he spews, including this one on Tuesday: "Hillary wants to essentially abolish the Second Amendment.If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is."
Is he actually suggesting that if Hillary Clinton is elected president, maybe somebody with a gun should take her out? Or maybe kill the justices? It's hard to read it any other way.
In the Washington Post, Paul Waldman explains why the way Trump meant it is just the way it sounds. It's not some random comment, taken out of context--there's a clear context around it, built from Trump's own previous advocacy of violence, Sharron Angle's "Second Amendment remedies," Sen. Joni Ernst's (R/IA) claim that she keeps her gun to protect her from the government, the Republican convention's cries of "Lock her up!" and insistence that she's a traitor and a murderer. Hillary Clinton has been demonized for decades by the right, and this year, people close to the Republican presidential candidate are not only questioning her patriotism but saying she should be shot or hanged for treason. That kind of talk reaches a certain segment of Trump's audience, and offers permission. Trump's comment makes that permission even more explicit, and his position as the party's nominee--one of the two people in the entire USA most likely to be our next president--gives it weight.
Trump is losing in the polls. If the election were held today, he'd lose by worse than McCain in 2008 or Romney in 2012. Probably much worse. And since he's all about ego and domination, he hates losing more than anything. This is going to get very ugly before November.
***
Immediately after the Trump comments and the NRA's tweet agreeing with them, the organization started running a $3 million ad buy on behalf of Trump. But then, for years, it's been insisting that people need guns to "protect" them from the federal government, so we guess Trump's call for assassination is right on message. More than ever, the NRA seems to be in favor of violent murder. The NRA gets much of its funding from gun manufacturers, but still feels the need to keep fleecing its membership for every penny it can get, and doesn't care what lies it has to tell to do so. The latest lie? The Trace reports:
On July 27, the NRA’s lobbying arm published a news item on its website, alerting its followers that the president “had once again released a sweeping gun control measure by executive fiat.” The Obama administration, the article declared, had issued an order defining commercial gunsmiths as “manufacturers” if they perform simple work like “threading a barrel or fabricating a custom part for an older firearm.” Such manufacturers must register with a division of the U.S. State Department that regulates the export of weapons and military equipment, or face “onerous criminal penalties,” the article said.
The NRA described the requirement as “new” and declared that the purpose was to put “smaller commercial gunsmithing operations out of business.”
The true story was considerably different. "Five days earlier, the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls at the State Department had, in fact, released a set of guidelines that explained what qualifies as gun manufacturing, and what does not. But the guidelines were not new — they were a clarification of existing rules. And they were assembled after a specific request from the National Sports Shooting Federation, a trade group that represents the interests of gun manufacturers."
Pro-gun death forces at the NRA have been claiming since before he took office that President Obama would grab everybody's guns. With just a few months left to go in his second term, he still hasn't done it. So now they're claiming that Hillary Clinton will. That's not true, either. Anyone who believes a word of their propaganda just hasn't been paying attention. And members are paying an organization to lie to them. Not our idea of a great deal.
The NRA's new ad calls Hillary Clinton a hypocrite for allowing herself to be guarded by armed Secret Service agents. A more absurd argument could hardly be imagined. Not only has Clinton never declared that all guns should vanish from the face of the Earth, virtually no single human being in favor of any gun legislation wants law enforcement to be deprived of guns. The argument is that guns in the hands of untrained civilians--often of questionable emotional/mental states--can be dangerous. If Hillary was somehow choosing to be guarded by armed prospective mass murderers, the NRA's claim might make some minimal degree of sense. As is, it only demonstrates how pathetically weak an argument they have.
Nobody's coming for people's guns. Nobody's going to repeal the Second Amendment. No politician with any power is even hinting at those things, nor will they. Anyone who has friends who think they have to worry about that would do well to disabuse their friends of that notion, because it's stupid to expend energy worrying about things that are just not going to happen.
This Week in Health Care
It's still early days, but a substantial new study finds that low-income people in states that have embraced the Medicaid expansion offered by the Affordable Care Act are reporting better health outcomes than people in states that haven't. They're more likely to have a doctor and a place to go for care, more likely to be tested for things like high cholesterol and blood sugar, and less likely to skip taking medicine because of the cost. They're also less likely to say they're worried about health care costs.
Which is how it's supposed to work. People in those states that haven't accepted the Medicaid expansion are paying for those whose states have gotten on board, with their taxes. But the low-income residents of those states are still suffering, because of state governments' ideological opposition to the expansion. In other words, those states are punishing their own residents for living where they do.
This Week in Economics
Donald Trump went to Detroit to make an economic speech that was loaded with inaccuracies and otherwise almost a laundry list of House Speaker Paul Ryan's (R/WI) economic ideas--fully embracing the failed concept of trickle-down economics, which has never worked and never will. While offering nothing that would create jobs or help grow the middle class, Trump proposed several ideas to fatten his own pocketbook (and those of his kids). As Brian Beutler explains at the New Republic: "Perhaps Trump really is a great negotiator. He’s revitalized his tenuous relationships with Republican leaders after the kind of week that has ended political careers—and all he had to do to patch things up was propose to give himself and his family several huge gifts. Ryan’s press secretary expressed particular satisfaction at the prospect of repealing the estate tax, which is also the most direct in-kind giveaway to the Trump children."
In the Washington Post, Matt O'Brien explains what's wrong with this approach:
"The Republican Party, you see, keeps insisting that the only way to increase growth is to do what has not, in fact, increased growth the past 25 years. That's freeing businesses and businessmen from overly burdensome taxes and regulation so they bless us with so much wealth-creation that some of it will trickle down to us plebes. The problem with that, though, is it didn't work when George W. Bush tried it. The private sector, as you can see below, actually added fewer jobs after Bush cut taxes than it did after Bill Clinton and Barack Obama raised them."
Here, Brookings Institute economists explain what the results of Trump's proposals would be--basically the opposite of what he claims:
His plan would drain government coffers of revenues. Coupled with his promise to avoid cuts to Social Security and Medicare – two big parts of the budget – it would boost public debt to all-time record levels.
Trump’s plan would provide massive tax cuts for the richest Americans and undercut every progressive feature of the tax code. It would slash top income tax rates, eliminate the estate tax – which only a tiny fraction of the population pays – and cut corporate and business tax rates by more than half. The plan would encourage massive amounts of tax avoidance by setting the top business tax rate at 15 percent and the top rate on wages at 33 percent.
The plan aims to encourage firms to create new jobs in the United States by offering a 10 percent tax rate on the repatriation of funds that are currently parked overseas. But we tried a similar policy in the Bush (43) Administration and it had no effect on jobs or investments. Nor should it be expected to today – corporations are already sitting on lots of cash reserves in the U.S., and they are not investing more.
The plan won’t generate economic growth. We’ve been down this road before. For example, Reagan’s tax cuts did not boost the long-term growth rate, according to authorities like conservative economist Martin Feldstein, who was a Reagan appointee, and Douglas Elmendorf, former head of the Congressional Budget Office.
What's good for Trump is not, unsurprisingly, what's good for America.
This Week in Voting
Last week, we were dismissive of the common Republican claim that voter ID laws are meant to combat widespread voter fraud. Here's why:
I’ve been tracking allegations of fraudfor years now, including the fraud ID laws are designed to stop. In 2008, when the Supreme Court weighed in on voter ID, I looked at every single allegation put before the Court. And since then, I’ve been following reports wherever they crop up.
To be clear, I’m not just talking about prosecutions. I track any specific, credible allegation that someone may have pretended to be someone else at the polls, in any way that an ID law could fix.
So far, I’ve found about 31 different incidents (some of which involve multiple ballots) since 2000, anywhere in the country. If you want to check my work, you can read a comprehensive list of the incidents below.
To put this in perspective, the 31 incidents below come in the context of general, primary, special, and municipal elections from 2000 through 2014. In general and primary elections alone, more than 1 billion ballots were cast in that period.
The author isn't saying that voter fraud doesn't happen. To the contrary, he writes, "Election fraud happens. But ID laws are not aimed at the fraud you’ll actually hear about. Most current ID laws (Wisconsin is a rare exception) aren’t designed to stop fraud with absentee ballots (indeed, laws requiring ID at the polls push more people into the absentee system, where there are plenty of real dangers). Or vote buying. Or coercion. Or fake registration forms. Or voting from the wrong address. Or ballot box stuffing by officials in on the scam."
Just not the kind of fraud that voter ID laws could conceivably address. On the contrary, the only practical effect of those laws is to make it harder for certain classes of people to vote (and you can tell which classes those are by how the laws are written--for one example, the Texas law that accepts a gun registration as an acceptable form of ID, but not a student ID from a state college or university).
When a party's electoral strategy revolves around preventing Americans from casting their ballots, something's seriously wrong.
This Week in What's Wrong With Republicans?
According to NBC News: "Seventy-two percent of registered Republican voters still doubt President Obama's citizenship, according to a recent NBC News|SurveyMonkey poll conducted in late June and early July of more than 1,700 registered voters."
In the poll, only 27% of Republicans said that President Obama was born in the United States. 41% said he wasn't, and the rest weren't sure.
Given ignorance on such a vast scale, is it any wonder that these people nominated a foul-mouthed charlatan?
This Week in Bears
Many of us watch the Brooks Falls bear cam from Katmai National Park in Alaska, because it's fun to watch bears stand around while salmon leap into their mouths (or not). Here's some video of a mother bear's response when her cubs go sliding over the falls.
And since we occasionally count Canada as part of "America," for the purposes of bears, here's a Canadian camper who woke up to find a bear exploring his campsite.
The "official" start of the presidential campaign begins after the two major-party candidates have been nominated at their respective conventions, and have accepted those nominations. We know, it feels like the campaign has been going on since about November 10, 2012. You're right, it has. And 2020's campaign began at the Republican National Convention--if you don't believe us, go back and watch Ted Cruz's speech again. But this week, the battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump (and Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, who likely won't even make the main debate stage because they won't meet the 15% polling threshold, which will cause Trump to threaten not to participate) is truly joined.
Of course, Trump also might refuse to participate because two of the debates are scheduled opposite NFL games. He says he got a letter complaining about that from the NFL. The NFL says it sent no such letter. Whatever path he takes, there's a theory out there that he'll find some way to dodge at least two of the scheduled debates, if not all three, because he doesn't want to go on stage with Hillary Clinton knowing she'll mop the floor with him.
Taking no chances, Trump has already started laying the groundwork to explain, after he loses, that he lost because the election was "rigged." Since his supporters seem to accept anything he says as truth (when clearly most of it is the opposite), that means they'll go into the Clinton presidency believing that she took the office through fraud, and is an illegitimate president. Many Republicans have spent the last 8 years saying the same about President Obama. It was a national disgrace then, and it will be should Clinton prevail in November.
And it's not just Trump. Roger Stone (whose name will pop up again farther down the page) said:
I think we have widespread voter fraud, but the first thing that Trump needs to do is begin talking about it constantly. He needs to say for example, today would be a perfect example: 'I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud. If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.”
I think he’s gotta put them on notice that their inauguration will be a rhetorical, and when I mean civil disobedience, not violence, but it will be a bloodbath.
Indeed, it bears recalling the GOP convention itself was to no small degree framed around this idea. The chants of “lock her up” at the convention, which were specifically encouraged and assented to by speakers on the stage, were at bottom about precisely that. Although a variety of investigations have failed to produce evidence of any criminal behavior by Clinton, those egged-on “lock her up” chants are about keeping hope alive, a hope that can be sustained deep into a Clinton presidency, if it comes to that. As Brian Beutler has argued, there’s a direct line from Trump’s birtherism to the “lock her up” chants — both are about denying the fundamental legitimacy of the opposition, in the most recent case in advance of her potential ascension to the presidency.
Now Trump and his top supporters have taken this a step further, explicitly saying that the process by which Clinton will have been elected, should she win, will itself be illegitimate. It is obvious that Trump will only amplify this idea if the polls continue to show that he is probably going to lose, and that Clinton is probably going to prevail.
Given that a sizable bloc of GOP voters is apparently willing to agree with Trump on pretty much everything, it’s plausible that a sizable bloc of them will be open to being convinced that the outcome of the presidential election was illegitimate — and that Clinton, should she win, is not legitimately the president. Trump will presumably have something of a national following after this is all over — one that remains deeply in thrall to Trumpism’s nativism, protectionism, white nationalism, and all-around deranged conspiracy-mongering — and it’s not hard to imagine Trump continuing to speak to that following by castigating President Clinton’s illegitimacy.
Brian Beutler at the New Republic argues that Trump is just harvesting fields Republicans have plowed, planted, and irrigated for years, with nonsensical claims of "voter fraud" and the like diminishing their constituencies' faith in the validity of elections. He writes, "For all his supposed deviations from GOP orthodoxy, Trump has unquestionably absorbed the language and conceits underpinning conservative opposition strategy—if not the finer points of it. Trump quite naturally feels entitled to appropriate that strategy in service of making excuses for his own likely defeat."
This is a very disturbing game for the Trump campaign to be playing. Here's another viewpoint on what it might portend. Of course, Trump has already demonstrated in numerous ways that he doesn't have any interest in what's good for America, only in what's convenient for Trump and his ego. The real test is whether Republicans who do claim to care about country--among them Arizona's own John McCain, and of course Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan--will finally withdraw their support from this clear and present danger. Anyone who doesn't is willfully putting party ahead of country. And a presidential election in which the loser doesn't concede, or insists it was stolen, will be a crisis the likes of which this nation has never had to face.
This Week in Taking the Bait
The best line in Hillary Clinton's acceptance speech at last week's Democratic National Convention was "A man you can bait with a Tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons."
Donald Trump wasted no time in living up to the criticism leveled in that line.
Since Thursday, he's been digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole he began with his response to the unexpectedly powerful speech by Khizr Khan (which we embedded here last week--if you haven't watched it yet, it's not too late).
He started by suggesting that he'd have liked to have heard what Mrs. Khan--who stood silently beside her husband as he spoke--had to say. Implicit in that comment, which he repeated numerous times over the next few days, was that perhaps, as a Muslim woman (wearing a hijab, no less, on national TV), she wasn't allowed to speak. She defused that notion by speaking up plenty, on cable news and in an op-ed she wrote for the Washington Post:
"Donald Trump has asked why I did not speak at the Democratic convention. He said he would like to hear from me. Here is my answer to Donald Trump: Because without saying a thing, all the world, all America, felt my pain. I am a Gold Star mother. Whoever saw me felt me in their heart."
She continues:
I cannot walk into a room with pictures of Humayun. For all these years, I haven’t been able to clean the closet where his things are — I had to ask my daughter-in-law to do it. Walking onto the convention stage, with a huge picture of my son behind me, I could hardly control myself. What mother could? Donald Trump has children whom he loves. Does he really need to wonder why I did not speak?
Donald Trump said that maybe I wasn’t allowed to say anything. That is not true. My husband asked me if I wanted to speak, but I told him I could not. My religion teaches me that all human beings are equal in God’s eyes. Husband and wife are part of each other; you should love and respect each other so you can take care of the family.
When Donald Trump is talking about Islam, he is ignorant. If he studied the real Islam and Koran, all the ideas he gets from terrorists would change, because terrorism is a different religion.
Donald Trump said he has made a lot of sacrifices. He doesn’t know what the word sacrifice means.
She's right--he did say he's made a lot of sacrifices. And she's right that he seems to be somehow unaware of what the word means. Trump said, "I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs."
As late as Monday, he was still attacking the family, despite the damage the feud is doing to his reputation and the grudging, tenuous support of the Republican Party establishment. Why? We think Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has the best explanation: Trump simply can't help himself. His entire world-view is built on one idea: dominance. If he's not "winning," he's "losing," and he hates to lose. So when he's attacked, he has to hit back harder--even if the attack comes from the parents of a service member who gave his life for the country he loves. Marshall writes:
When Khizr Khan and his wife Ghazala appeared at the Democratic convention they attacked and shamed Trump. He no doubt experienced it that way and the chorus of approbation the Khans received from virtually every part of the political spectrum deepened his sense of humiliation and loss of status and standing. As I've noted in so many contexts, the need to assert dominance is at the root of all of Trump's actions. His whole way of understanding the world is one made up of dominators and the dominated. There's no infinite grey middle ground, where most of us live the vast majority of our human relationships. That's why even those who are conspicuously loyal are routinely humiliated in public. In that schema, Trump simply had no choice but to lash out, to rebalance the equation of dominance in his favor. It's an impulse that goes beyond reason or any deliberation. That's what left so many would-be or maybe allies flabbergasted at how or why he would have walked straight into such a buzzsaw of outrage.
For a narcissist like Trump, the rage and emotional disequilibrium of being dominated, humiliated is simply too much to bear. He must lash out. What he said in one of his tweets responding to the Khans is perhaps the most telling. "I was viciously attacked by Mr. Khan at the Democratic Convention. Am I not allowed to respond?" The use of the adverb 'viciously' is a good tell that Trump is a narcissist. But setting that aside, most people would know that the answer is "No, you're not." Certainly you're not allowed to respond in the sense of attacking back. Their son died serving the country. You don't get to attack them. Someone with a moral consciousness who is capable to empathy would understand this through a moral prism. A smart terrible person would understand it as a matter of pragmatism. Smart terrible people spend time to understand human behavior, even if the moral dimension of it is invisible to them or a matter of indifference. Just as importantly, they have impulse control.
Trump's need for dominance and his inability to control his responses is a big part of what would make him so dangerous in the White House. Any foreign adversary who understood that would be able to make a President Trump obey his or her every whim, just by applying a little bargain-basement psychology. If you want Trump to do something, tell him he can't. Tell him he's a loser because he won't. First he'll make excuses and blame others, but eventually he'll have to do whatever it is, just to prove he really can. His entire presidential run can be explained this way--in 2012, when he toyed with running, the overall public response was that he didn't mean it, he was just trying to get free publicity for his TV show, and that he would never commit himself to a serious run. So many voices saying he wouldn't meant that ultimately, he had to.
Side Note: As hard as it must be to be Donald Trump, imagine trying to be a Trump surrogate--to have to go out into the country and try to convince people that you think of every single American alive, Trump alone is the best choice, the only choice, to lead the country. Self-delusion is an absolute necessity for that role, and it helps if it's accompanied by an utter lack of empathy and a complete absence of shame. Case in point: Trump supporters, including the aforementioned former close advisor Roger Stone and radio "personality" Michael Savage, are repeating a nonsensical claim that Khizr Khan is actually a "Muslim Brotherhood agent."
Then again, Trump's surrogates seem to be just as misinformed as the candidate himself. This week, official campaign spokesperson Katrina Pierson pinned the blame for Captain Khan's death on President Obama and Hillary Clinton, saying, "But surely you can understand the confusion, considering how Donald Trump never voted for the Iraq War, Hillary Clinton did. And then she didn’t support the troops to have what they need. It was under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that changed the rules of engagements that probably cost his life. So I don’t understand why it’s so hard to understand why Donald Trump was confused about why he was being held responsible for something he had nothing to do with."
Captain Khan died in 2004. Obama became president, and appointed Clinton Secretary of State, in 2008. To her partial credit, Pierson reluctantly admitted the next day that she was wrong about the timeline.
This Week in NATO
Trump further embarrassed himself (or would have, had he that capacity--it's hard to see a blush under the orange, anyway) by showcasing his foreign-policy ignorance on ABC's This Week. The critical part came here, in a discussion of Trump's love affair with Vladimir Putin:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Yeah, they took away the— part of the platform calling for provision of lethal weapons to Ukraine to defend themselves. Why is that a good idea?
TRUMP: It's— look, you know, I have my own ideas. He's not going into Ukraine, okay, just so you understand. He's not gonna go into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down. You can put it down. You can take it anywhere you want—
TRUMP: Okay— well, he's there in a certain way. But I'm not there. You have Obama there. And frankly, that whole part of the world is a mess under Obama with all the strength that you're talking about and all of the power of NATO and all of this. In the meantime, he's going away. He take— takes Crimea. He's sort of, I mean—
The first part was a reference to the RNC platform. Trump paid almost no attention to the writing of the official party platform, which is not surprising because he has no interest in actual policy, and wouldn't follow one if it existed. But when it came to a plank about providing weapons to Ukraine, to defend itself from Russian invasion--an idea that had been popular with Republicans--Trump supporters fought furiously to water down that plank.
A president doesn't necessarily have to be an expert on every minute detail of foreign policy, but he or she should be at least generally knowledgeable. Trump has said that most of what he knows about foreign policy issues comes from watching "the shows," by which he presumably means Sunday morning news shows--which occasionally feature experts like himself.
Worse, Trump's business ties to Russian oligarchs appear to be numerous and important to his financial empire. And Russia's oligarchy is, of necessity, close to Putin. So Trump and Putin, while perhaps not golfing buddies, seem to be linked together in ways that matter a lot to Trump. And having Trump in the White House, with his insane ideas about the importance of NATO (or the lack thereof, in this case) would be very good for Putin--hence perhaps Russia's involvement in hacking the DNC and working with Wikileaks to release damaging emails right before the convention.
In this piece, TPM's Josh Marshall outlines some of the potential dangers that emanate from Trump's connections to Russia and his innate nature ("impulsive and stupid," Marshall says, which can hardly be denied). It's worth a quick read.
Donald Trump asked a foreign policy expert advising him why the U.S. can't use nuclear weapons, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said on the air Wednesday, citing an unnamed source who claimed he had spoken with the GOP presidential nominee.
"Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump. And three times [Trump] asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked at one point if we had them why can't we use them," Scarborough said on his "Morning Joe" program.
It's unclear where Millennials are getting their information--or lack thereof--but according to recent polling, 40% of them in swing states don't know the difference between Trump's and Clinton's position on climate change (hint: he insists it's a hoax, she considers it a grave threat that needs to be addressed). Environmental issues are important to the Millennials polled, but they haven't bothered to learn that on virtually every issue, they agree more with her position than his--instead, they assume that the two candidates' positions are about the same (hint: they aren't). Is this the effect of the Bernie-or-Bust crowd telling people that she's far more conservative than she is? Hard to tell. But if they want to vote on environmental issues, they need to get themselves educated fast, because Trump would be a disaster.
Side Note 1: Vox.com points out that of the four major presidential candidates (Clinton, Trump, Stein, and Johnson), Clinton is the only one who's "not pandering to the anti-vaxxers."
Side Note 2: People think a lot of different things about President Obama. One thing that might not immediately come to mind--unless you're a scientist--is that he's become a true science geek.
This Week in Economics
Speaking of comparisons, Moody's Analytics has done studies on the economic plans offered up by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The results? Trump's would cost 3.5 million jobs, reduce the GDP, and cause a major recession. Clinton's would create 3.2 million jobs, increase GDP, and accelerate growth.
Part of the difference? Trump wants to curtail immigration. Clinton understands that population growth spurs economic growth. In an aging country (as ours is), when a greater percentage of the population is leaving the workforce, that population needs to be replaced (and ideally increased) some other way. Immigration is how that happens, and Clinton wants to increase immigration, not halt it.
There's much more, of course. Trump's plan would vastly increase the deficit; Clinton's wouldn't. We aren't saying deficits are necessarily a problem; right now, with interest rates literally better than zero, we should be borrowing more for big, job-creating programs. But running up deficits to fund smart programs that grow the economy and invest in the future is one thing; running them up to cut taxes for billionaires is something else entirely. Clinton would increase taxes on the rich, Trump would slash them. And on and on. Basically, she would continue the Obama policies that brought us out of the great recession and have built a record-setting stretch of job growth, and he would reverse them.
One switcheroo--on Tuesday, Trump announced an infrastructure program that would spend twice what Clinton is suggesting. He's right; infrastructure spending is needed, and with today's negative interest rates (the government makes a profit just by borrowing the money), it makes no sense not to have a big program, to create lots of jobs and at the same time improve health, education, and productivity. Of course, it's Trump, so he could change his mind in fifteen minutes, and the details were vague at best. But the basic idea is a good one.
In poll after poll, people say they trust Trump more than the decidedly wonky Clinton to handle the economy (although in the most recent poll, that has, thankfully, turned around). We can only assume that's because they see him as a successful businessman, without knowing much more than that--like how bad a businessman he really is, many people he's cheated, how dishonest his business dealings often are, or how for all his "success," he'd be richer now if he had simply invested his father's "starter" check in an account with a decent return, so in fact he's lost money. Even his real estate investments have underperformed the real estate market as a whole. In economics--as in so many other areas--Trump is a risk we can't afford.
This Week in Voting
Having candidates to choose from doesn't matter if you're not allowed to vote. When we want to know what's going on with voting rights, the source we turn to is Rick Hasen's Election Law Blog. Hasen wrote an op-ed for the New York Times this week, running down some of the court-ordered rollbacks of "voter ID" laws (in quotes because they're really voter discrimination laws). The most recent example was in North Dakota, where a federal court told the state to "soften" its law, finding that it discriminated against First Americans. In the past few weeks, progress has been made in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Texas and other states around the country, resulting in restored voting rights for hundreds of thousands of Americans. That's good news for democracy.
But as the NYT reported on Sunday, the battle continues: "The majority-white Hancock County Board of Elections and Registration was systematically questioning the registrations of more than 180 black Sparta citizens — a fifth of the city’s registered voters — by dispatching deputies with summonses commanding them to appear in person to prove their residence or lose their voting rights. 'When I read that letter, I was kind of nervous,' Mr. Flournoy said in an interview. 'I didn’t know what to do.'"
Since the Supreme Court's awful Shelby County v. Holder decision in 2013 gutted the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act (on the obviously flawed basis that institutional racism had disappeared from the country), there's no mechanism to prevent actions like this from taking place before the fact. The only remedy is individual lawsuits wherever voting rights are abridged. Because lawsuits can drag on for a while, unknown numbers of Americans can be prevented from voting in the meantime. We're glad the courts are weighing in now, before the presidential election, on many of the major cases. But clearly there are efforts made at city and county levels that still might block eligible voters from the polls. That's bad news for democracy, and about as shameful an act as any government body can perform.
This Week in Red Lives Matter
Last week, we wrote about the Black Lives Matter/Blue Lives Matter conflict, and why it shouldn't be seen as a conflict but as two sides of the same problem. Unstated was that black Americans aren't the only ones targeted by police way out of proportion to their actual percentage of the American public. The Guardianreports:
Nationwide, Native Americans are disproportionately killed by police. Based on data from the Counted, the Guardian’s database of police killings in the US, fatal police shootings of black, white, Hispanic and Asian Americans have all gone down slightly or remained roughly the same from 2015 into 2016, but twice as many Native Americans have been killed over the same period.
Because the number of Native Americans, relative to other racial and ethnic categories, is quite small, just a handful of incidents can dramatically change the per capita rate. Still, 13 Native American people have been killed just over halfway through 2016, more than the 10 that were killed in all of 2015.
This Week in Springfield and Sesame Street
The Simpsons offer their take on the Clinton vs. Trump race:
And Sesame Street introduces Donald Grump, "whose name equals trash." He's looking for an apprentice.