This Week in the Campaign
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.
Greg Sargent at the Washington Post adds:
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—
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, he's already there, isn't he?
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.
Here's a brief but insightful explanation from the Brookings Institute about just what Trump doesn't understand about NATO.
Side Note: Zack Beauchamp at Vox.com interprets Trump's comments in a different--but no less frightening--way.
This Week in Terror
Did we mention "frightening?" According to CNBC:
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.
In case he's still wondering, here are some answers.
This Week in Science
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 Guardian reports:
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.
This Week in Bears
Bears enjoy a refreshing dip in the summertime, just like people. Here they visit a beach at Lake Tahoe and a river in New Jersey.
People, on the other hand, rarely get to go for a 5-mile ride on top of a garbage truck, but that's what this New Mexico bear did.
I'm glad you touched on the Native lives issue. It's worse, per capita, yet gets no attention outside of Native press. Breaks my heart.
Posted by: Marcy | 08/05/2016 at 06:09 PM