“Sorry Venkman– I’m terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought.”
Recent polls have become terrifying. But can the biggest potential disaster since the Civil War actually win?
Can Trump Actually Win? Will He? Dark Days In September
Tag Archives: 2016 Election
Trump’s Projections and Lies: What Can You Do?
“And her hair, what’s up with that?”
Are Trumps insane projections a strategy, or just an insight into his lack of character, and is there a difference?
Trump’s “Foreign Policy”: Another Day, Another Impossible Low
So, who is worse, the sociopath or the enabler?
There are some things– like, for example, what is happening literally anywhere in the world– you should “brush up on” before deciding to run for President.
Creepy Trump Kids And The Election’s Biggest Lie
A weird and ill-thought-out tweet provided one of this miserable gut-kick of an election’s biggest unintentional laughs, save every time Jeb Bush spoke, but also highlighted its single-biggest dishonesty.
Mexico Visit Shows Again That Trump Campaign is 100% Phony
I run the best casinos. Believe me.
I’m not concerned– relative to my sweaty panic over the possibility that the worst person in America has a legitimate shot to become the next President– that Trump said one thing in Mexico, and then a completely different thing in his big immigration speech to an adoring crowd. The substance isn’t that interesting, and it was expected. After a solid week of people saying he had to “soften” his immigration approach, there is no way Trump wasn’t going to double down. That’s his personality: a dimwitted sociopathic 4th-grader. We know this.
No, what is much more interesting, and telling, is how he came out and said that the topic of who was going to pay for his big and beautiful wall didn’t come up when he met with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. I actually believed this, because I figured both men tacitly admitted that was an insane idea, only believable by the goons in his Leni Riefenstahl stag parties.
It turns out, of course, that it apparently did come up, first thing, in the form of Peña Nieto declaring that there is no way Mexico is going to pay for his wall. So who is lying? If you have to ask, you haven’t listened to a single word Trump has ever said. He lies as a matter of course, and habit, because the sell, and the con, are the only thing that matters.
Think of his Mexican presser as him going to talk to one group of suckers who want to invest in, say, the third casino he is building on one stretch of road in Atlantic City. He just met with some experts, and is ready to deliver the news: everything is fine. “Well”, say the nervous investors, “wouldn’t all three just suck revenue from one another and lead to a collapse?” Trump would say
“Well”, say the nervous investors, “wouldn’t all three just suck revenue from one another and lead to a collapse? Did they say anything about that?” Trump would say “You know what? It didn’t come up. Everyone says it is a great idea, and it’s going to make so much money.” Trump lies because that’s how he sells things to gullible investors, including banks. He just makes up whatever he has to do to please an audience, to get them to buy his pitch. It’s different than what normal politicians
It’s different than what normal politicians do, because he has absolutely zero substance. The lie, the con, the sell, is the entirety of his approach. There’s nothing behind it. It’s why he lies with such ease and without hesitation. Behaving in this way is integral to his– and I use this word in the loosest possible sense– character.
Remember, even if he used to, Trump doesn’t build anything anymore. He doesn’t manage or run things in a real sense. He sells his name to people to use as some kind of stamp of authenticity. And that’s how he’s run his campaign. There is no actual policy, no substance. The campaign is just a way to keep the campaign going, to keep selling. It’s alie created in order to tell more lies. It’s just another reason why, while his winning would be a disaster, the fact that it is working at all has exposed a Trump-shaped rot in the American character.
Trump in Mexico: “We Didn’t Talk About The Insane Parts”
I’m honestly not sure who is more demeaned by a “Trump pinata”
So, Trump’s Mexican visit was basically what you’d expect from mutual bluff-calling between a couple of dopes: awkward, pointless, and irrelevant. I’m sure there will be some pundits saying that “Trump appearing to be a statesman could convince voters!”, doing that thing we’re they are the ones convincing people of the appearance but pretending it occurs naturally. Politico already is! But still: I think it’ll be a blip on the campaign, and his attempt at coherence on immigration tonight is far more important. Because, contra the high-level discussions, it isn’t about “hardening” or “softening”; it’s about having a policy at all. He has never had one beside a few grand gestures.
That’s the only thing that should be talked about vis a vis his Mexico excursion (except maybe his bizarre and again wildly intemperate and unpresidential desire to mix it up with Vicente Fox just this morning). Because there have been only three things about which Trump has been even slightly consistent on.
- Mass deportations (though maybe not)
- A big beautiful wall (spoken like a moron)
- Mexico paying for wall (which is ludicrous)
So, today?
Mr. Trump said the two did not discuss the issue of forcing Mexico to pay for a border wall — one of the signature promises of his campaign.
Mr. Trump said the subject of a border wall came up, but not who would pay for such a massive construction project.
They talked about issues, except for one of his signature promises, probably because both sides realize it is completely fucking insane. That’s the only important thing: Trump can’t even talk with foreign leaders about any of his beliefs because they are completely divorced from reality and easily among the stupidest things a major political figure has ever said. This isn’t what anyone should call “Presidential”.
Trump in Mexico and Rubio on the Ineffability of Life: Campaign Quick Hits
Outreach!
Trump in Mexico
I’ve always thought that one of the worst aspects of being the leader of a country that wasn’t America was having to meet with every mouth-breathing midwest governor who was once called “Presidential material” by David Broder. They’d want to burnish their foreign policy cred, so they’d travel to the Czech Republic for a meet-and-greet where they’d discuss the “bilateral cooperation and trade opportunities between Oshkosh and the good people of Czechistan”, mouth fumbling over “bilateral”, clearly the first time they’d ever pronounced it. But the foreign leader couldn’t say no, because what happens if Scott Walker wins, you know?
It has to be even worse with Donald Trump, whom every single person outside the US (except for Nigel Farage and Hungarian neo-nazis) knows will be an absolute disaster, and a repulsive one at that. What do you say when you meet him? Well, that’s what will be on the mind of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto today when he meets with Trump, who accepted at the last minute a long-standing invitation.
On the one hand, this could be a disaster for Trump. It’s pretty clear he has never really studied the issues of trade or immigration, his two main topics regarding Mexico, and obviously has no clue about any other topics of concern the two countries might share (indeed, he is probably ignorant to the idea that there could be topics other than “stealing our jobs” and “sending rapists”). And the country is pretty hostile to him. There is a good chance this turns out poorly.
The Super-Racism Behind Trump’s “Appeal” To Black Voters
Pictured: The Outreach Brigade
This has been Trump’s “pivot week”, a transparently phony attempt to pretend his campaign isn’t fueled entirely by white anger, and hasn’t been one long sustained howl designed to yodel bigots out of the woodwork. Hillary did a good job with her speech yesterday making sure that no one can forget that the alt-right misogynist racist part of his campaign isn’t just one aspect; it is the driving force. So Trump has pretended, of course, that the Democrats are the real racists.
This started last week when he asked black voters what they had to lose in voting for him.
“What do you have to lose? What do you have to lose? You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good. You have no jobs — 58 percent of your youth is unemployed,” Trump said on Friday in Dimondale, Mich., a mostly white community near Lansing. “What the hell do you have to lose?”
He’s also talked about crime, and how he would stop it so people wouldn’t get shot, and he would do so by making the police super-empowered, which might not be what the black community totally wants to hear right now, but regardless. Also, some African-Americans took exception to his idea that all their lives resemble area where even Robocops fear to tread. This is his outreach.
Tomorrow’s Irritation’s Today: There is No Pivot From Bigotry
“Lady, you knew I was a snake until you covered my ‘attempt at tacking toward the center'” – Ancient Parable
Imagine that you’re at a bar with a guy and he’s railing about blacks and Mexicans and Jews. He’s just going off, and with each drink, he gets more and more unhinged about them, more conspiratorial, until toward the end he’s a sweaty mess and raving about how they are all out to get him and ruin his life, because they are evil and awful people, barely even people.
Then, about a week later, you see him. He mentions that he had a job interview, and it turned out that the people in charge were black, so he didn’t say anything racist for a few hours. Would you think, well, this fellow certainly has turned a new leaf! Because raw self-interests forced him to tamp down his essential terribleness for a spell, he clearly isn’t a terrible racist anymore!
Of course you wouldn’t. So hey, media: don’t pretend Trump’s sudden incoherence on immigration, and his faltering, obviously-insincere attempts at softening his hardline stance are anything but a transparent attempt to erase the last 14 months (and really, 5 years). You know it is a cynical ruse when he actually uses the word “softening”, which is remarkably insincere. It’s like saying “we’re about to start pandering, believe me.”
Everyone “pivots”; we know this. It’s part of politics. But running on naked racism and white nationalism for over a year, then pretending you didn’t mean that, isn’t a pivot. It’s a way to hide the essential nature of your campaign to fool people who are just now paying attention. This isn’t something he should be able to get away with. The stakes are too high.
So I really, really, don’t want to see serious discussions on “did Trump manage to massage his message enough to appeal to his base without alienating more people?” He’s still the know-nothing fascist dimwit he’s always been, now he’s just pretending to be a real candidate for five or ten minutes. He’s clearly not. It’s part of the cynicism of GOP leaders— just pretend that you won’t be an epochal and country-wrecking disaster of a President for 3 months, ok?”– and it is incumbent upon the media not to let them get away with it. This isn’t Romney pivoting away from the far right. It’s George Wallace putting on Groucho glasses and pretending to be someone else. It’s a gaboon viper telling you he’s a caterpillar. It really can’t be allowed to work.
A Quick Followup on Unskewing
Not pictured: a lot of human voters.
So, last post was mostly talking about Trump’s own brand of imagined reality, but there are also a lot of people who clearly believe that the polls can’t be right, because: rallies and signs, man. Ceca, in his Salon article, points out how this can take place, in the doughy form of Eric Bolling at FOX.
Interrupting a discussion about the hiring of Breitbart overlord Steve Bannon to run the Trump campaign, Bolling complained, “These polls, Dana, honestly, we have to stop with these polls.” Bolling continued, “They’re insane with these polls. Just look at what’s going on. You look at a Trump rally, and there’s 12, 15, 10,000 people.” In addition to demanding that “we have to stop with these polls,” Bolling compared his inflated estimates of Trump’s crowd sizes to Hillary’s lesser-than crowd sizes, insisting that rally attendance is an accurate predictor of election outcomes. It’s not.
He’s right! It really, really, isn’t. We went through this with Mitt Romney in 2012. Don’t forget– don’t ever forget– Peggy Noonan’s list of yard signs and vibrations for why all the polls were wrong. When people are vested in an outcome, they will believe anything.
But it is easy to believe, honestly, and very tempting. It’s especially easy for some reporters who often have to drive long distances, because when you do so, you spend a lot of time on the highway. An example: last week, when my bride and I were driving home from the Adirondacks, we went through upper New York, near the Canadian border and rounding around Fort Drum before heading south to 90 near Rochester. Coming out of the highlands, we pavered off into flat country, flat and poor country, where each little town, dotted sparsely with ramshackle houses, broke-down cars, and dying businesses, blended together.
We saw dozens, if not more, Trump signs. In one town there was an (at least) 15-foot-high sign blaring “TRUMP” in enormous, hand-painted letters. One upholstery place had two signs. The first was a two parter, in which the proclimation of “Jesus is Lord” was above the nature of the business, and next to it was a “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” sign. This was real Trump country. Hundreds of miles of Trump’s America.
We also went through the Lake Erie tip of Pennsylvania, as well as across Ohio. Most of that was interstate, but not all (we took a few detours). Throughout that, we saw exactly 1 Hillary sign that I can remember, and that was in Erie, PA. I would conservatively put the estimate of total Trump-to-Hillary signs at 100-1.
Donald Trump is not going to win New York, nor Pennsylvania, and probably not Ohio. So when people are tallying up signs, remember, it is meaningless. The vast stretches where not many people live, but those who do live difficult lives, can be distorting.
The important thing, for Democrats, and the media, is to remember these places exist between elections.
Shooting Irrelevance 