Tag Archives: 2016 Election

07.06.16
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Is Trump Gozer or The Marshmallow Man? A Response on Trump’s Racism

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This was always weirdly hot, right?

Last night over at Slate, Jamelle Bouie had an excellent piece on how Trump is defying every political norm. Not the ones where he is winning despite not having a campaign, or any idea of anything going on anywhere in the world, and being completely unlikeable, but rather that where any indecency is not only excused, but expected, and largely ignored. His argument is that the political class, including the media, really has no idea how to deal with it.

For now, it suffices to say that it’s happening—that the Trump campaign is a superhighway for an organized horde of hate that defines much of the pro-Trump grass-roots presence online. Rooted in online communities like Reddit and 4Chan, these supporters—who often identify as “alt-right,” a current of conservative politics on the internet where racism thrives and anti-Semitism flourishes—are virtual shock troops against journalists who criticize Trump or scrutinize his campaign and its personalities. Jewish journalists, in particular, face the worst abuse.

…If political media exists to do anything, it’s to reveal this flow from the fringe. To educate audiences on what these ideas mean, to give context for symbols like the one we saw on Saturday. Thus far, the media seems ill-equipped for the job. For every display of “pro-truth” bias, there are a dozen examples of mindless coverage, as reporters present racist rhetoric as simple “controversy” or frame anti-Semitic propaganda as a “he said/she said” dispute.

…In short order, the boundaries of political speech expand to include outright bigotry. Right now, Trump is showing his dedicated following of white supremacists that you can deny the humanity of other people and still thrive in mainstream politics. If this all feels dangerous—like the beginning of a new, more frightening kind of politics—that’s because it is.

He’s absolutely right. This has happened stunningly fast, the mainstreaming of his hate, and that of his followers. Trump knows, somewhere in his jackal heart, that everything he does will quickly be placed in the framework of normal political discussion. “Well, he did take a meme from a noted racist/anti-semite site, and tweeted it out, and lied about it, but on the other hand, he says he didn’t, so discuss the controversy.” It’s remarkable, and terrifying. We should be marching in outrage against it, but most of us, at best, just sort of blog about it. The more elite talk about how he is “breaking the rules.” The worst and most gutless still back him.

The question I have is if Trump is the destroyer, or just the outcome of how we’ve destroyed ourselves. He seems to me to be the logical (and completely irrational) culmination of a million trends: our idiot media with its constitutional inability to recognize that one party has gone completely insane, its addition to “both-sides-do-itsm”; the way that social media has amped up all our tendencies toward hatred and loudness; our addiction to pseudo-reality spectacle and personality over character and intelligence; our national inability to reflect on mistakes; and more. The system is broken, and we’re huge and unwieldy and angry and bitter and dispossessed. It seems almost impossible that a barking mad know-nothing wouldn’t appear, especially one who already embodied a lot of those trends.So is Trump Gozer, who is creating the destruction, or is he merely the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, who is the avatar of our destruction. Choose and perish, right? The

So is Trump Gozer, who is creating the destruction, or is he merely the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, who is the avatar of our destruction. Choose and perish, right? I personally lean more toward Gozer, because this galumphing ball of hate and artifice is who he has always been: a racist, misogynist strongman with a pea-brained sense of the world and a galactic idea of a deserved destiny. He’s helped to create the media and cultural environment in which he thrived.

But then, it wouldn’t have worked if we didn’t let him come in, if we didn’t, on some level, choose to accept this. To keep accepting things until they became inevitable, and suddenly we’re saying it is “too PC” when we condemn him for retweeting outrageous and inflammatory racist stats from a white nationalist website.

The Ghostbusters thing is not an accident. This summer, we’re having a new Ghostbusters movie, with an all-female cast. This is: fine. They are all funny actors, and it could be good, or it could be bad. It probably won’t be as good as the first, but it might be better than the second. But the fact that they are females sent a certain sector of dickless morons into a frothing frenzy. Men’s Right’s Activists, who are literally the worst, conspired to make the trailer the most “disliked” of all time.  Because, as we know, it is emasculating and a symbol of PC run amok for females to bust ghosts. That’s a man’s job, and has, throughout American history, been the traditional prerogative of men. Busting ghosts. This is all Shillary’s fault. People actually believe this. 

That’s the culture which Trump has come to dominate. People who see aggrievement in everything, and who believe that everything the have is being taken away, and who can, with the strength of like-minded people online, convince themselves that they care even more than they actually do, until it becomes a reinforcing circle of amplified anger. That circle is where Trump lives. He’s not just Gozer, and not just Stay-Puft: be built the circle. He’s our own Ivo Shandor, and his buildings keep going up.

07.01.16
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VP Wanted: Must Have Experience in Government, Jowls

 

Trump/Gingrich 2016: Vitality!

 

WaPo: Donald Trump’s campaign has begun formally vetting possible running mates, with former House speaker Newt Gingrich emerging as the leading candidate, followed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. But there are more than a half dozen others being discussed as possibilities, according to several people with knowledge of the process.

Let’s see: a disgraced former Speaker who, when running against the avatar of pure charisma that is Mitt Romney managed to win all of South Carolina, and who if anything is even more of a fabulist than Donald Trump, or a blustering East Coast Soprano-wannabe who is hated in his state, with looming scandals and a complete lack of knowledge about anything happening outside Bayonne?

Gingrich has been a top Trump toady throughout most of the campaign, and to be fair, he deserves some credit for recognizing quickly that Trump is the apotheosis of the white anger that Gingrich weaponized in 1994. In his lizard heart, he realized that Trump had what it took to exploit that wave, made even angrier in the last 20 years (and especially the last eight). Newt, while amoral, is smart enough to know that Trump isn’t actually a leader or a good pick to be President. I assume his thinking is that if he is Veep, Trump will mostly delegate to him, and he can have one last shot at remaking America.

That’s quite a calculation, and it is dependent upon Trump being ok with someone so ambitious and outspoken being on the ticket. Chances are Trump will pick Newt just to put him in his place, because he like humiliating people. I’m sure Gingrich thinks he can be invaluable, and will be respected by Trump, but the clash of their world-historic egos will be fascinating, as well as nauseating.

Christie’s calculation is easier: he has nowhere to go. He’s termed out, and it isn’t like he could (or would) run for Senator. It’s VP, AG, or a radio show. All his money is on Trump.

Just imagine Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, Mike Ditka, Bobby Knight, and Chris Christie standing on a Cleveland stage, laughing wildly while patting each other on the back. That’s your vision of the next four years: fat, angry, old white guys, simultaneously shouting “not politically correct” at each other, sizing up each other’s wealth and pretending that they’ll never die, while a ragtag group of Myrtle Beach refugees in Confederate Flag Looney Tunes shirts howls “we’re the Silent Majority” behind them, casting murder-eyes at the janitor.

If that’s too grim for a holiday weekend, I hope this part will cheer you up. It made me laugh to beat the bank, that’s for sure.

Culvahouse, a former White House counsel who is managing the vetting for Trump, was the lawyer who vetted then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for the GOP vice-presidential nomination during the 2008 campaign.

Trump only hires the best.

 

06.27.16
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Chaos In London Suggests That Maybe Listening to The Dumb Is A Bad Idea?

Maybe don’t listen to people like this?

Bad political chaos in London today, as the pound continues to plunge, and Leave leaders continue to backpeddle on the bill of goods they sold to the public. It makes one think: maybe fearful race-baiting demagogues who promise great things in exchange for opting out of the modern world maybe shouldn’t be listened to?

Remember, one of the Leave leaders, Michael Gove, said that people in Great Britain “have had enough of experts”, i.e. the people saying that Brexit would be a disaster. Does this sound familiar?

Like Mr Cameron, Mr Gove faced intense scrutiny of his campaign tactics, in particular the claim that the UK sends £350m to the EU every week.

Sky’s political editor Faisal Islam said Mr Gove knew that figure was wrong, and accused him of importing the “post-truth” politics of Donald Trump to the UK. The UK Statistics Authority has said the figure “is misleading and undermines trust in official statistics”, because it is a gross sum and does not account for Britain’s rebate and funding received from the EU. In response to Mr Islam, Mr Gove agreed to have the figure independently audited.

A number of economists do favour Britain’s exit from the EU, among them Andrew Lilico, executive director of Europe Economics, and Patrick Minford of Cardiff University.

Mr Gove opted not to name them, however, preferring to focus on how economists and economic organisations had failed to predict the financial crisis. “I’m not asking the public to trust me. I’m asking them to trust themselves,” he said.

That could easily be Trump, as could Boris Johnson’s and Nigel Farage’s idiot claims that the 350 million pounds per week could go to the NHS, a claim from which they are already saying that they didn’t mean literally. Who could be so preposterous as to hold them to that, now?

The Right in America has long held the same weaponized hatreds of experts who challenge their sacred beliefs, and have been able to turn a reliance on boring stats and figures against opponents who use them. “Experts” are disconnected eggheads who hate real Americans and just want to keep driving around in their Ferraris paid for by your tax dollars. In everything from supply-side economics to climate denial, experts are derided and shunned. The only ones that count are the ones explicitly backing their theories. And even then, they pretend to not be experts, but just walking avatars of common sense.

“Common sense” is the key phrase here, a cousin of Gove’s “I’m asking (the public) to trust themselves.” It’s not that experts can’t be wrong or blinded or biased. They aren’t arguing that. They are arguing that, because they are “experts”, they are inherently biased and wrong, because they are against the people. It’s a way to make people who know what they are talking about as an “other”, an alien, in opposition to common decency. Just like immigrants.

It’s a way to lump together everyone who isn’t in the same fearful corner. It’s an easy tactic used by cruel idiots, from Reagan to Farage, and of course, Trump. They don’t have any facts partly because they don’t care, and partly because there just aren’t any to back them up. Truth doesn’t matter as much as a visceral poke to the reptile brain. If you wonder why Trump did so well when he wasn’t a “conservative”, it’s because he was able to directly appeal to fear. He made a tribal connection by creating a small band of insiders and putting everyone else on the outside, whooping around the encircled wagons. I think that’ll doom him the the general, of course. But the tactic, in a post-national world, is only going to get stronger.

06.25.16
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Trump Backs Down on Muslim Ban, Is A Tremendous Liar

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Pictured: Well-decided terror countries. Look at them!

Donald Trump, whose major foreign policy trip was to promote his golf course (which will do very well if the markets collapse, so pretty sweet, right?), today seemed to back down on his insane and racist and unworkable plan to ban all Muslim immigrants. He didn’t mean all of them. Just the ones from “terror countries.”

Slate!

The day began with the presumptive Republican nominee appearing to contradict his vow to fully ban Muslims from entering the United States, telling reporters on a golf course in Scotland that he wants to restrict entry by people from a number of “terror countries.” That came after he said that it “wouldn’t bother me” if a Scottish Muslim entered the United States. Which countries would he consider to be “terror countries”? Trump didn’t specify. “They’re pretty well-decided. All you have to do is look!”

Even then though it didn’t sound like Trump was saying citizens from certain countries should be fully banned, suggesting there could be a vetting process that would allow exceptions. “I don’t want people coming in from the terror countries. You have terror countries! I don’t want them, unless they’re very, very strongly vetted.”

WaPo!

Afterward, Hicks said in an email that Trump’s ban would now just apply to Muslims in terror states, but she would not confirm that the ban would not apply to non-Muslims from those countries or to Muslims living in peaceful countries.

This is obviously a very interesting and well-thought-out policy! It’s pretty well-decided which ones are. Just look. Probably Yemen, and Syria and Iraq for sure, and let’s not count out Somalia. Iran, yeah. Saudia Arabia, and maybe the Gulf States. Not Qatar, I like Qatar, I have some very quality people who I did business with. Oman? Eh, better safe than sorry. Mauritius? Never heard of it. But yeah. Morocco, Libya, of course. Indonesia, I remember Bali, so yeah. Malaysia? Are they Muslims? It sounds Asia-y, not Muslim-y. They’re in. Muslims from India? Only if they are from the very terror parts.

Look, you’re going to hear about this, and his promise that he won’t deport every Mexican because “people are going to find that I have not only the best policies, but I will have the biggest heart of anybody” (actual quote!), and you might hear that he is pivoting toward the general. Being all Presidential. He’s backing down from the very keys to his success, and his sworn promises. Presidential!

But what this confirms, once again, is that he’s making everything up as he goes along, because he has literally no idea about anything in the world. “The terror countries” is a perfect example. He can’t be assed to think of anything, so he just makes up a phrase and demands it into meaning. His spokesperson, Hope Hicks (turn out to vote), has to pretend this is an actual policy with actual meaning, because, remember, in Trump world, what he says, no matter how dumb (“until we figure out what’s going on!“)  is contorted into gospel by his surrounding sycophants.

The media might say this is pivoting. It is just another sign of how deeply unserious a man this is.

06.24.16
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Trump on Turnberry: Every Campaign Ad From Here On Out

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump poses with a bagpiper as he arrives at his revamped Trump Turnberry golf course in Turnberry Scotland, June 24, 2016. (Photo by Andrew Milligan/PA/AP)

Dude wheezing into a sheep’s bladder is a billion times more dignified. Image from MSNBC

“If the pound goes down, more people are coming to Turnberry, frankly,” he said, referring to the location of his resort. “For traveling and for other things, I think it very well could turn out to be positive.”
-Trump, today, as the world burns.
Issac Chotiner, who is just doing invaluable work at Slate, has a terrific column about Trump’s “absurd, solipsistic” response to Brexit, but he published it too early, before the above statement came out. (He also perfectly describes Boris Johnson as “a slightly sinister and slightly absurd Trump-lite figure”) There is nothing more Trumpian than celebrating chaos simply because it benefits him. This has to lead off every single Hillary ad for the next six months.
Of course, that might not even be the low point of his presser, as MSNBC said:
Trump proceeded to hold a press conference in Scotland, against the backdrop of one of the most important political moments in the modern history of the United Kingdom, where he spoke at great length, and in great detail, about his new golf resort. The Republican candidate boasted about refurbished holes on his course, plumbing, putting greens, and zoning considerations.
This is the least, and therefore most serious candidacy in the history of the Republic. The Leave idea might be transatlantic, and even global (or Western), but I don’t think that will be enough. Hopefully, just Trump being Trump will convince even more people that he is singularly unfit to be on the library board of a bookless town, much less the President. We can only hope.
06.24.16
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“Make America White Again” Landmarks On The Road To Hell

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2016!

The story of Rick Tyler, running for Congress in Tennessee’s 3rd, is a few days old already, which I know is eternity in internet time. But we’d be remiss not to mention it. It seems like most of the commentary, understandably, is of the “christ, what an asshole” variety. And he is! He’s one of those hateful flakes who keeps running and losing (unlike hateful Jeff Flake, who keeps winning), and amping up his message every time to make himself more known. No such thing as bad press, right?

But Jesus…

“For these reasons we are confident that a widespread and creative billboard advertising game plan could go a long way toward making the Rick Tyler For Congress candidacy both viable and a force to be reckoned with. Clearly we are in uncharted waters, in that there has never been a candidacy like this in modern political history. Of great significance, as well, is the reality of the Trump phenomenon and the manner in which he has loosened up the overall spectrum of political discourse.”

“The Make America White Again billboard advertisement will cut to the very core and marrow of what plagues us as a nation. As Anne Coulter so effectively elucidates in her book, Adios America, the overhaul of America’s immigration law in the 1960’s has placed us on an inevitable course of demise and destruction. Yes the cunning globalist/Marxist social engineers have succeeded in destroying that great bulwark against statist tyranny the white American super majority. Without its expedited restoration little hope remains for the nation as a whole.”

Now, stipulating that:

  1. It’s northeastern Tennessee, and not totally representative of America
  2. He doesn’t have a chance of winning
  3. The second paragraph is winger word salad, seemingly engineered from the snatches of talk radio that he picks from the gaping ether of his mountainous home

This is still scary stuff. Even in that 2nd paragraph, he gives ultimate lie to the conservative movement, not injecting racism into its normal language, but making plain that’s what has always been its animating force. It was a comforting story Trump laid bare as myth. And that’s the point of this.

He’s encouraged to lay out a nakedly racist billboard by the Trump campaign, and its success. That he won’t be successful doing so isn’t a contradiction of the awesome forces Trump, and Trumpism, have unleashed in our uncertain world.  (Don’t think this wasn’t essentially the Brexit slogan.)  If he tried to pull this shit in the 50s or 60s, there’d be a lot of people telling him it was pretty tacky, and no one would have tried it after at least the early 70s. Even naked racists like Helms and Thurmond knew they had to pretend there were other motivations to their salivating hate.

He won’t win. He won’t come close. And he has been condemned, in all quarters (though if Trump has been asked about it I haven’t seen). He’s a sideshow, after all, right? It’s just a slight stone rolling down a hill. But they all are, until it’s an avalanche. It’s always a sideshow, until the carnival has taken over the town, barkers running madly in the streets and the clanging sirens and blinking lights of the decaying midway blare through your window every night, exposing you to the nightmares of your soul.

06.23.16
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Brexit: The US Fallout

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Pictured: the face that millions of people want to be President.

Leave declares victory a few minutes ago, and already the Asian markets are tumbling. Some of this is correction from the huge upsurge in stocks earlier on Thursday as it looked like Remain would win. This proves, again, that the markets are insane and are based on the gut instincts of terrified and greedy children. But regardless.

In the US, this will play out interestingly. I think it will give Trump some ammunition. After all, he supported Leave (as we said, “Leave” is the heart of Trumpism), and Obama, as any sane US president would be, was against it. This will allow Trump to talk about how his vision is correct, how the English (and he’ll probably say English, because he doesn’t know the difference between England and Great Britain and the UK) love him, and how he was really the big factor, even though he was no factor at all. It’ll be a minor coup, mitigated by his arriving in Scotland tomorrow in a miasma of phony triumph, Scotland being the one place that was firmly Remain. I don’t think he’ll have a glowing reception.

(And meanwhile, can we get some coverage on how unbearably tacky it is for a US Presidential candidate to abscond so that he can brag about his new gilded golf course? It’s not entirely Presidential, right?)

But overall, despite the strength this will give the Leave movement in the US, we’re talking about two very different places, demographically. I don’t think the Welsh will turn be too terribly inspiring in Johnstown. Trump’s crowing will hurt him even more in groups in which he is already getting pummeled. If there is economic chaos, globally, due to this, that always hurts the incumbent party, of course, but I don’t think the ramifications will be big enough, quick enough. The EU won’t collapse, and Great Britain was always at an arm’s length, anyway.

It’s still a scary, ugly time.

 

06.21.16
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Clinton’s Money Advantage and Citizens United

 

Pictured: Clinton campaign headquarters. Actually, you could probably write an essay on internet bros, Hillary Clinton, and Skyler White.

 

So, as everyone knows by now, Hillary Clinton is laying an absolute mollywhomping on Donald Trump in terms of fundraising, having over $42 million on hand to his $1.3 million. There are candidates for Water Reclamation boards that have more than $1.3 million.

The reasons are both obvious and not so obvious. Clinton, of course, is a very experienced fundraiser and knows how to play the game. Indeed, that’s the main thing that people don’t like about her: her comfort with big money. Trump’s pathetic fundraising is because he doesn’t want to do the work of being President, much in the same way he didn’t want to be an actual businessman, just a guy who could con suckers and take advantage of bankruptcy laws to make money. Or maybe that is an actual businessman. Regardless. It’s a weird combination of laziness, arrogance, and unsleeping avarice. It’s the spirit of his campaign.

Needless to say, there is a bit of an uncomfortable glee among Democrats, and obvious charges of hypocrisy. Democrats, in the main, don’t like the role of money, and loathe the Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates to jowly barbarians looking to destroy the social safety net, tear up any environmental legislation, and basically make the government little more than a tool for regulating sexual behavior. So it is weird to be dancing under a rain of money.

Hillary, in particular, has come under the most fire for this. It was in April that Glenn Greenwald argued that Clinton was undermining the anti-Citizens United front by saying that while she was accepting money, she was not being corrupted by it. On the surface, that makes a certain amount of sense. The argument is that money is inherently corrupting, which is a valid argument, but the option is to a) not take any money for an expensive campaign and lose or b) say “yup, I’m corrupt.”

It’s a weird and extremely leftier-than-thou argument, because it demands a kind of impossible purity that would rather lose elections, and have no chance at making better laws. Would I rather that there wasn’t this kind of money in politics? Of course- and that’s exactly why I’m voting for Hillary Clinton in the fall. I voted for Bernie in the primary, but millions of more people chose another candidate. An imperfect one (as was Bernie!) but someone who is far better on the issues I care about, including money in politics, than her opponent.

There is a thread of argument that says Hillary is insincere in her opposition to Citizen’s United, or at least sincere for the wrong reasons. This stemmed from a debate line about campaign finance.

And let’s remember, Citizens United, one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in our country’s history, was actually a case about a right-wing attack on me and my campaign. A right-wing organization took aim at me and ended up damaging our entire democracy. So, yes, you’re not going to find anybody more committed to aggressive campaign finance reform than me.

 As Slate’s excellent Mark Joseph Stern argued, after laying out three reasons to be opposed to Citizens United, “Clinton concocted a fourth: Citizens Unitedwas bad because it let a corporation attack my candidacy.” In a post on Washington’s Blog, Eric Zeusse furthered that argument, saying that it showed no actual commitment to overturning Citizen’s United, and was just a way to trick the “suckers” into voting for a fake Democrat. He added to that argument by saying that while her website pledges to overturn Citizens United, it doesn’t say how, making it “Yet more sucker bait.” (It actually does say how- appoint better justices, a constitutional amendment, etc. You just have to scroll down. However, these details might not have been there when Zuesse wrote his piece.)
This is, I think, an unfair charge, and sort of the price of being Hillary Clinton. With nearly any other politician, her answer would be seen as imperfect, but as a vehicle of passion. “Yes, I care about this. I understand what these people are capable of. I know how we got here.” It wasn’t a great answer, legalistically, but any good-faith reading of both the answer and other things she has said on the topic make it clear that she isn’t just rejecting Citizens United because of it attacking her. This was just a (inelegant) way of demonstrating that it is personal for her.
But she isn’t any other politician- indeed, there wouldn’t be this kind of movie made about anyone else, save for Obama. Republicans think she is a shrill liberal Balrog, summoned from the cruel depths of the 60s to fight back their reactionary victories. The left thinks she is a far-right fake Dem, tainted by her connection to Wall Street, and unbearably corrupt.
What she is is a professional politician, with all the attendant compromises, who is center-left, hawkish in many ways (though not all, as Fred Kaplan demonstrates), and someone who wants to win. And to win, you have to raise money. To overturn Citizens United, you have to get the votes. You have to win the Presidency. You have to take back the Senate. You have to have the money to make your case. It sucks, and it is uncomfortable, and yes, it demonstrates the awful power of money in politics. It isn’t a cause for joy that Hillary has all his money, and Trump has none. It’s just a cause for some relief.

 

06.20.16
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In Which I Disagree With Paul Krugman

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Pictured: the face that millions of people want to be President.

Paul Krugman’s column today is about why the Republican Party was unable to stop Trump, but it seems like Hillary Clinton and the Democrats have been able to. There are a lot of structural and logical reasons: namely, he’s not running against 16 people who are scared of him, now. He’s the focus, and he’s massively, comically, underprepared. (A nationwide field staff of 30 people. 30!)  It’s the natural result of running a con- once it starts to get exposed, once the gilded walls turn out to be painted plaster, it all crumbles quickly.

The real question is why this particular bill of goods could be so easily sold during the primary, and I think that’s where Krugman’s analysis is revealed to a little off. The main point is that the Republican Party practices a top-down ideological form of control. I’d argue that the Republican Party is virtually leaderless, yes, but I still think he’s correct if you extend that to the blogs, to Fox, to talk radio, and all the snake-oil outlets. And he argues that because they are about one ideology, and that ideology is hollow and broken, it couldn’t offer any resistance. The Democratic Party is more “robust”, because it has a large number of interest groups that compete with each other.

But a big factor, I’d argue, is that the Democratic establishment in general is fairly robust. I’m not saying that its members are angels, which they aren’t. Some, no doubt, are personally corrupt. But the various groups making up the party’s coalition really care about and believe in their positions — they’re not just saying what the Koch brothers pay them to say.

This, I think is incorrect. To be sure, there are a lot of Republicans who only ask how high when told to jump, and not a single one of them hangs up when a Koch (or another rich winger) calls. But I don’t think it is as easy as that.  If David Koch decided tomorrow that he wanted to raise taxes and protect the environment, I don’t think you’d see Republicans start behaving better. Some, sure. But for the most part, these are true believers.

Guys like Cruz, and many more like them in the Senate and (especially) the House, and younger comers in the various ALEC-and-Koch-bought statehouses are absolutely products of the right-wing era, who grew up with Reagan and came of age with talk radio, Newt, and the Clintons. They do what the Kochs want, yes, but that’s because their interests and beliefs are aligned. If anything, these are people who are far more committed (and far meaner) then the Kochs. They are people who believe fiercely that the government should exist only to punish poor people and minorities, to impose a form of Christian sexual morality, and to bomb terrorists, and to bomb foreigners.

And more to the point, that’s not just the leaders. It’s the base. That’s why Trump won. It isn’t because right-wing ideology is in decline (though I think we see that it is), it’s because some people believe it, every word, and Trump played it perfectly. It’s an ideology built on mendacious machismo and hippie-punching ignorance. It’ll be here until it is driven away with loss after loss after loss, and the professional politicians finally see the writing on the wall. That’s part of why this election is important. If the True Believers, including Trump, who has no principles but is their avatar, get the nutstomping they deserve, it can make the less-committed professionals think twice.

06.17.16
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A Data Point for the Con

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Mr. Perfect!

A key part of a long con, which is what Trump is running, is convincing the marks that the good stuff is just around the corner, that the payment is coming. You get them in too deep to pull out. It works well in business a lot, if you can rely on bankruptcy laws and rules that favor the already rich. Trump is hoping it works in elections.

“I’m four down in one poll, three and a half in another that just came out, and I haven’t started yet,” Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said in a phone interview on Thursday night, a thought he volunteered as he dismissed concerns from Senate Republicans that he may be a drag on their candidacies in the fall.

“Haven’t started yet” is key to the con. So is fluffing numbers- he’s not down a lot (he’s down a historic amount), there are just a couple of itsy-bitsy polls that have him down a tiny amount, and anyway, we haven’t gotten going yet, ok? Things look bad now but only because I haven’t tried, and when I do, so much winning you’ll beg me to stop, you’ll scream and cry and gnash your teeth to make the hurricane-like winning cease, you’ll literally drown your best friend in tar and mud, watching them beg for breath as the person who they trusted the most in the world betrayed them, because you just can’t handle all the winning. That’s how much winning we’ll do. Just you wait.

You can see him doing the same thing in one of his bullshit businesses. Oh yeah, the casino is a little under now, but it’s got so much gold and glitz it will do great soon, and then I’ll pay you for your work. Trust me, once we get this going, it’s going to be amazing, and all bondholders will get twice- no, 864 times their investment. Trust me.

It’s questionable if this can work in an election. I mean, electorally it almost certainly won’t, but the question is if he can keep this up without it blowing up in his face, without everyone catching on that his campaign is being run the same way as a con. It’s a sham campaign, a flat shampaign, but it isn’t (just) about money. It’s about getting people to go along with what he wants without having to make any actual investment. It’s how he’s run every business in his entire life. And it’s gotten him close, though still very far, from the Presidency.