Category Archives: Politics

06.03.16
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Skin Too Thin To Fail: What’ll Sink Trump

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Mr. Perfect!

I mentioned earlier today that Trump responded to Hillary Clinton saying he had thin skin by immediately huffing that he had the opposite of thin skin, which is of course what someone who is totally secure and unflappable would do. In an interview with Jake Tapper today, notable mostly for continuing his assumption that any Mexican can’t be an unbiased judge because of the wall, he doubled down on that claim.

“Well, I don’t have thin skin,” Trump protested. “I have very strong and thick skin. If you do a report and it’s not necessarily positive but, you’re right, I never complain. I do complain when it’s a lie or when it’s wrong.”

(Which of course, it always is)

Trump then went on to explain how his thick skin and “good temperament” made him have “one of the best-selling books of all-time” and a successful television show.

This is what, I think, will sink him with all but those who feel a tribal connection to him, either through whiteness or general Republicanness (not unrelated!). But anyone who is sort of on the fence about him, emotion-wise. It’s the idea that no matter what anyone says, he has to come back with the most absurd statement, because he can’t possibly have a moment of self-doubt. That’s not a political tactic, although it works politically. It’s who he is.

You saw it with the Trump Steaks nonsense. After Mitt Romney made fun of him for having a steak line that failed, Trump brought out steaks to prove they still existed, on election night! A night he won real legitmate primaries. As Chait pointed out: “His campaign displayed store-bought steaks for the media, not even bothering to fully remove the labels of the store at which they purchased them.”

That’s the thing: anyone with an ounce of security would have said, “You know what- I’m a businessman. In business, you take chances. You win some, and you lose some. I win a lot more, but no one’s perfect. I’m still a billionaire.” He could have then lit a pile of $100 bills on fire on threw the flaming pile at a lackey who would have thanked him for it. That’s how you be an asshole, but one slightly tethered to the real world.

There are a lot of people who love Trump because he says racist things, and that own’t change. But for those who don’t, they’ll see a small, vainglorious toad, who overreacts in bizarre ways to the slightest hints that he is fallible. It’s deeply unattractive, and there is a serious limit to its appeal.

06.03.16
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Trump’s Security Briefings: The First Real Sign Of the Sweaty Terror

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“On my first day in office…” -Donald Trump

Until now, the fears of a hypothetical Trump presidency- and even just typing that makes me a little woozy– were just that: hypothetical. We’ve all been able to imagine just how scary it would be, given his combination of rampant insecurity, raw egotism, paranoia, and general inability to keep two coherent thoughts in his head at any one time. But now, as the possibility becomes decidedly more real (although demographically unlikely), the actual outlines of just how fearful his win would be begin to take shape.

Hillary Clinton’s excellent attack on him  yesterday, in which she mockingly demonstrated his unfitness to serve (and demonstrating that she knows how to needle him), was just the beginning.  He further elaborated upon his attacks on the judge in his civil case, claiming that merely being of Mexican descent was a conflict of interest with Trump, a truly frightening line of thinking. And today, the Times has a piece by legal experts worried about his contempt for the First Amendment, separation of powers, and more.

But again, those are all still in the realm of “wouldn’t it be bad if he became President?” As he gets closer to the nomination, though, various norms start to take hold, and we see just how grotesque his victory really is. Reuters had the far more interesting story, about how security officials are worried about giving Trump the daily briefings that are traditionally accorded a nominee.

Eight senior security officials told Reuters they had concerns over briefing Trump, whose brash, unpredictable campaign style has been a feature of his rise as an insurgent candidate. Despite their worries, the officials said the “Top Secret” briefing to each candidate would not deviate from the usual format to avoid any appearance of bias.

Now, to be fair, one says that the briefings are more of an overview, and won’t tell him much that he won’t get from reading the paper. And it’s not like he has the intellectual wherewithal to actually explain anything. The briefings can be politically advantageous, because they give a patina of respectability to his rantings (“I’m getting security briefings because they know I’m the smartest. And let me tell you, people, ISIS is bad, ok. And the people doing the briefings are saying, ‘Mr. Trump, you have to save us, crooked Hillary can’t do, you’re the only one who can stop this’, ok?”).

However, it isn’t the politics of it. It’s the fact that people are beginning to really realize how different this is from anything we’ve ever seen, how large a mutation. We have someone who is not just intellectually unfit, or even morally, but tempramentally and emotionally. We have someone who is truly dangerous, and the people tasked with keeping this country safe are genuinely terrified. This needs to be made a much bigger deal. We’re seeing what the actual election of Donald Trump as President means- a complete breakdown of every national apparatus. The media needs to hammer this, to make sure he loses in such a way that completely discredits the terrifying politics of personal resentment.

(Of course, in the story, Rueters also quotes a sneering RNC official who makes an flagrantly dishonest snark about the email scandal, I guess for “balance”. This allows places like The Hill to have headlines reading “US Intelligence Officials Concerned About Briefing Trump, Clinton”. Goddammit, Reuters, and The Hill. This isn’t balance. Both sides aren’t doing it. This only normalizes the most abnormal and scary campaign we’ve ever had.)

 

06.02.16
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Breaking! Republican Endorses Republican

I’ll say this for Paul Ryan, his little community-theater Hamlet act turned out to be pretty smart. He waited until Donald Trump was having one of his worst weeks, as the “complete scam artist” story seemed to be taking hold, then unleashed the least-surprisng endorsement of all time, which will lead to breathless headlines about how Trump is “unifying the party.”

It was a sharp two-man game of 3-card monte, with Ryan shuffling at the table and Trump luring in the marks, designed to sucker the dimmest coneys in the media. Ryan got to pretend he was smart and thoughtful, and Trump got to pretend there were a few different sides of the Republican Party for him to win over. It looks like dominoes are falling, but this was all preordained.

06.01.16
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Trump The Flim-Flam Man and the Judge: The Only Thing Hillary Needs To Talk About

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Pictured: Donald Trump campaigning for the support of the FOP.

There’s a lot of talk that the Hillary Clinton camp hasn’t yet settled on a narrative about how best to handle the unpredictable ravings of the idiot madman against whom she’ll most likely find herself running. If I may be so bold, I think over the last few days he’s provided the clearest opening, and it comes from a combination of his phony real-estate “schools” and the racism that underpins his campaign.

From The Guardian:

A federal judge has given the world an unprecedented glimpse into the ruthless business practices Donald Trump used to build his business empire.

US district court judge Gonzalo Curiel on Tuesday made public more than 400 pages of Trump University “playbooks” describing how Trump staff should target prospective students’ weaknesses to encourage them to sign up for a $34,995 Gold Elite three-day package.

First off, this is an obvious swindle, and there was some evidence in the GOP primary that this was the best hit on Trump, because it got to the heart of his self-image as a great, world-bestriding businessman. It shows him to be a cheap grifter, hitting the flats for their life savings and skipping town. His string of bankruptcies, and the fact that most of his business now is just licensing his name, deflates the basis of his campaign, showing him to be a cheapjack Lyle Lanley, always just one step ahead of the mob.

It’s also when he lashes out the most, and he did so, in a series of tweets and rants against the judge. This is when people say they are “disappointed” with the decision. Not so our Trump.

Donald J. Trump

✔‎@realDonaldTrump

I have a judge in the Trump University civil case, Gonzalo Curiel (San Diego), who is very unfair. An Obama pick. Totally biased-hates Trump

4:45 PM – 30 May 2016

Donald J. Trump

✔‎@realDonaldTrump

I should have easily won the Trump University case on summary judgement but have a judge, Gonzalo Curiel, who is totally biased against me.

4:55 PM – 30 May 2016

You’ll notice of course that these came within 10 minutes of each other. Not really a temperate person. The Times already noted how disturbing it is to see a Presidential candidate attack in such a personal manner the judicial branch, but for the real horrorshow, let’s go to this part of a speech.

Trump hit back calling Curiel a “hater”, a “total disgrace” and “biased”. “I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump. A hater. He’s a hater,” Trump said at a rally near the courthouse in San Diego. “His name is Gonzalo Curiel. And he is not doing the right thing … [He] happens to be, we believe, Mexican.”

See, it’s the last part that really sets this on a whole new level. There is no way to interpret that except to say that Mexicans are bad, and are aligned against Trump, and are therefore aligned against America. It is absolute naked racism. This case in no way involves, say, a border wall, in which case maybe you could make a (still racist!) case that a Mexican judge would be biased. But not in this one.

Curiel, by the way, was born in Indiana.

This is all Hillary needs to do. His attacks on judges show his thin-skin nd wild intemperance. His quote on “happens to be, we believe, Mexican” should be run over and over in every Hispanic market to make sure his numbers never climb. And his obvious swindle, the details of which are now perfectly clear, should be hammered every day. This is a man who sees Americans as a way to feed his ego and his wallet, and sees everyone else as an obstacle to be removed. Between his venality, his absurdity, and his racism, there’s really nothing more to say.

06.01.16
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Donald Trump as Tinpot Strongman

Perfection, of a kind, he was after
And the poetry he wrote was easy to understand;

-Auden, “Epitath on a Tyrant”

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The man is gone, but the hat remains. Image from nakedtourguideprague.com

It’s doubtful that Donald Trump would know who Emomali Rahmon was. To be fair, very few Americans do. I was only vaguely aware of him. He’s the President of Tajikistan, a landlocked country in Central Asia that doesn’t come up very much. It’s not considered one of the world’s happiest places. With borders that touch Afghanistan and the rebellious Xinjiang region of China, not to mention its abutting of Jammu and Kashmir, it is in a fairly rough place in the world, and has never enjoyed much stability in the post-Soviet era. That’s about to change, albeit in a way that makes most people uncomfortable.

Rahmon, the President, successfully passed a ballot referendum that scrapped term limits, as well as lowered the age one could stand for President to 30, which by a great coincidence gives his son the ability to run. It’s instituting a President-for-Life plan, and it worked. A low-information campaign (which mostly talked about vague “changes to the constitution”), coupled with a population weary about politics, helped make the referendum a landslide. With 94.4% of the votes, Rustam, the fresh-faced whelping, now has a clear path to 40 years of power. It’s hard to say democracy died in Tajikistan, as it was never fully born. But it’s easy to see that this is how authoritarians act. They tell you not to worry you weary hearts. They tell you it’ll all be better if you just let them take care of it. They tell you that all you have to do is give them power, and things will be fine.

Donald Trump may never have heard of Emomali Rahmon, but both he and his gruesome campaign head, Paul Manafort, know that playbook by heart. They’ve taken the lessons of him and every other tinpot tyrant that has stumpled across history, and brought them to America.

Continue reading →

05.27.16
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Never Forget: Donald Trump Is A Giant Goddamn Dummy About Climate Change

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Tar sands extractions are a good idea with no downsides.

This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice. Jan 1st, 2014

Not a dime’s worth of difference between Hillary and Donald, right?

Never forget that Donald Trump is a man who is stupid enough to believe that if it is cold out, global warming isn’t real.

Never forget that Donald Trump is so galactically goddamn dumb that he thinks extreme and unprecedented weather events, happening with terrifying regularity, are a sign that everything is fine.

Never forget that Donald Trump is such a peabrained dipshit that he literally believes China invented the idea of global warming in order to bankrupt the US.

It’s not that Donald Trump doesn’t believe in anything. It’s that what he believes in is so gigantically moronic that his environmental plans include pulling out of the Paris climate accords, which he wrongly thinks allows foreigners to dictate our climate policy, and to build the Keystone XL pipeline, which he wrongly thinks will have a positive impact on energy independence. He also thinks he can bring back coal, absent market forces. This proves again that he doesn’t understand how things work, whether it is the fungible nature of the energy market, coal, pipelines in general, the Paris accords, or, of course, anything at all.

Kudos, by the way, to the New York Times for not hedging when covering his idiotic “energy speech”, which he used to show his wholly non-existent bonafides. They actually used terms like “repeatedly denied the established science” and “However, the next president will not have the legal authority to unilaterally rescind the climate rules” and “In fact, at the heart of the Paris Agreement are voluntary pledges put forward by the governments of over 190 nations” to contradict him when he said things that were in opposition to reality. This is a good way to cover his truthless campaign.

But really, I don’t think he’s lying, in this case. I think he is genuinely dumb about everything that can’t make him money, and even that prowess is questionable. He’s a rich moron who believes that being born rich means he has everything figured out, as long as he can filter a newspaper through his brain, and doesn’t have anyone around him who says “Donald, you’re a giant goddamn dummy for thinking that snow in New York in January disproves science. The Northwest Passage is now a real thing, you enormous featherweight pinhead.”  He lies about nearly everything, but on other things, he’s just a genuine tiny-brained mouth-breather who couldn’t shoot himself in the ass with a shotgun in a phone booth.

But, you know, not a dime’s worth of difference.

05.26.16
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Thiel and Speech

Yesterday, I was a bit flippant about Peter Thiel funding lawsuits against Gawker, mostly because, while I love a lot of the sites like Deadspin and Gizmodo and IO9, Nick Denton is distasteful and outing private citizens for clicks means that the end is pretty deserved. But as Thiel revealed his long game to destroy a media company he (justifiably, since it outed him in 2007) hated, it became clear that this was more than a billionaire vendetta, which is terrifying enough. It’s the blueprint for the destruction of an independent press.

Felix Salmon smartly lays out the dangers in an essay for Fusion.

It gets worse. If Thiel’s strategy works against Gawker, it could be used by any billionaire against any media organization. Sheldon Adelson, Donald Trump, the list goes on and on. Up until now, they’ve mostly been content suing news organizations as plaintiffs, over stories which name them. But Thiel has shown them how to go thermonuclear: bankroll other lawsuits, as many as it takes, and bankrupt the news organization that way. Very few companies have the legal wherewithal to withstand such a barrage.

This is scary because there is no recourse. We all like to laugh when idiots say that their 1st Amendment rights are being stolen because a private company takes down their racist comment on a message board. At this point, on the internet, there are more jackasses ready to pounce on the misconception of what “Freedom of Speech” means than there are people doing the misconcepting. And in a way, that’s what is brilliant about Thiel’s plot. It’s perfectly legal and constitutional, so long as he can find enough cases.

That’s what makes it so terrifying. If a billionaire can come up with enough cases that are plausible enough to not get thrown out, any media company can be bankrupted defending themselves. Unlike with 1st Amendment cases, there is no legal or constitutional recourse. And so what will most likely happen is that media companies won’t want to pay for these lawsuits, so the choice is to fold, or to self-censor.

In every authoritarian country, self-censorship is the more insidious form of silencing. It’s not like totalitarian countries, where there were clear lines. In these semi-states, it isn’t always clear what will get you in trouble. You fear for your life or livelihood, and so don’t go near issues that skirt the danger zone. Then the skirt gets pushed back further and further, and eventually, you don’t even think twice about your silence. It becomes second nature. We have that for national security, here, which is bad and dangerous enough, but not for much else.

Well, Thiel has shown how the monied will be able to impose self-censorship on anyone who wants to continue making money producing content. And if that sounds sterile, it is. If it gets to the point where journalism that offends anyone rich and powerful becomes financially impossible, all we’ll have is content, a set of listicles stomping on the human throat, forever. That this comes against Gawker makes it seem like just desserts. It isn’t. It is, in fact, part and parcel of the Rule of Money, and if we elect a billionaire who has made silencing the press an open part of his platform, the transformation could be complete.

(Update: initial version said “in every totalitarian country” in first sentence of penultimate paragraph, but that wasn’t accurate. Clarifications added)

05.24.16
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Trump and Hillary Poll Numbers: The Bernie Argument

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If Bernie won, you’d be seeing this guy on a lot more GOP ads.

One more political quick hit, and that’s it, I promise.

It’s true that, for the moment, Bernie matches up more favorably against Trump, and has a much higher personal approval rating than does Hillary. I don’t think that would ever change. He genuinely seems likable (though that might be changing a bit), and Hillary has always had problems, partly due to her, largely due to other factors (such as lies, innuendo, and an idiot press). I can’t imagine a scenario where Bernie is less liked than Hillary Clinton.

That said, these numbers, which Sanders supporters use to say he should be the nominee (as opposed to millions of actual voters), don’t take one thing into account: namely, the right wing media has, since Clinton became inevitable, praised Bernie at her expense, and stopped criticizing him. If Sanders was actually winning, and had a shot, you’d hear the word “socialism” 400 times a day. They’d be conflating it with Communism, and calling him “comrade”, and talking about how “it isn’t a coincidence that his rise comes on the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, and is that what we really want?”, and I promise that you wouldn’t be able to drive through three consecutive counties in this great nation of ours without seeing his face and Stalin’s on the same billboard. If you can’t picture Trump going around saying “Listen, ok, no one knows history better than Trump, and communism was really bad, ok?” then you have a tragic lack of political imagination.

Socialism, thankfully, isn’t as much a poison word for people who grew up after the Cold War. But it still has an emotional sway with millions and millions of people, and if Sanders was the nominee, that’s all you’d be hearing. I don’t know if that would sink him, since he’d also get more airtime to explain himself, and why socialism is not un-American, but a genuine part, the best part, of our economic and cultural heritage. But it’s disingenuous to suggest that polling numbers would be the same if he was closer to the nomination, and the target of the same kind of smear campaign Hillary has been under for 30 years.

05.24.16
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The Ken Starr Times Puffery and The Normalization of the Paranoid

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Remember: this guy was super gross. Image from NYMag

“There are certain tragic dimensions which we all lament,” Mr. Starr said in a panel discussion on the presidency at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

“That having been said, the idea of this redemptive process afterwards, we have certainly seen that powerfully” in Mr. Clinton’s post-presidency, he continued…

If there is a bigger weasel phrase in history than “tragic dimensions which we all lament”, I don’t think I’ve heard it.

The Times this morning ran a piece on Ken Starr, the sex-obsessed maniac whose pursuit of Bill Clinton helped turn the 90s into the sordid and greasy decade that it was, in an attempt to show that age has mellowed him to the point where he can depersonalize the very recent past. It was also a clinic in the way that scandal, especially that regarding the Clintons, becomes normalized, and how nonsense phrases that mean nothing become a sort of shorthand for the initiated, and a vague synecdoche for everyone else. This isn’t history, either. It’s obviously directly relevant to this year’s campaign.

Continue reading →

05.24.16
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Bernie and The California Debate: A Political Quick Quiz

  1. When Fox News wants to help you out, you are doing something
    1. Right?
    2. Wrong?

It’s probably not a stretch to say that the gracious offer of Fox to host a debate before the Democratic primary is not a 100% good-faith gesture.  Turning it down is a very normal part of politics for Hillary Clinton. She has an insurmountable lead, an attempt to flip the superdelgates is antidemocratic. It moves past populism to personality-politics, which is where the facile and ridiculous “Trump and Bernie” comparisons start to make a sliver of sense, very uncomfortably.

What does Bernie expect out of a Fox News debate? A reasoned argument about the policy differences between them? Or an opportunity to savage Hillary Clinton in front of a large audience, and to play into the Fox/GOP narrative of Hillary being untrustworthy and unlikable, dredging up past “scandals”, and thus, doing Trump’s homework for him? If he expects the former, he’s being naive. My fear, and deep regret, is that he isn’t being naive at all.