Tag Archives: Trump

08.18.16
by

#AmericasMerkel: Trump Talks White Nationalism

 

Pictured: Trump Towers

 

Confused by Trump’s insistence that Hillary Clinton will be “America’s Merkel”, someone who is generally considered a pretty strong and resolute leader, easily the most powerful in all of Europe? It’s not just because her and Putin don’t get along (although it’s probably a bit of that), and it isn’t just because of rank misogyny (though it’s also very much that). It’s because he gets his talking points directly from white nationalist sites like Stormfront and VDare.com!

Think Progress has the scoop.

To white nationalist communities that fervently support Trump, Merkel has been a popular villain. Sites like the Daily Stormer, the White Genocide Project, American Renaissance, and The White Resister have posted constantly about her since the Syrian refugee crisis began escalating earlier this year. They have accused her of making a “deliberate attempt to turn Germany from a majority White country into a minority White country.” They have called her a “crazy childless bitch,” “Anti-White Traitor,” and “patron saint of terrorists.” They have asked in articles about her, “Why would you allow a woman to run a country, unless you were doing it as a joke?”

This is not a coincidence. You don’t hire the Breitbart guy and parrot an obscure line of attack about a leader Americans generally like, if they even know at all, without being intimately linked to white nationalism. Trump’s campaign grows more and more openly and flagrantly racist. What he’s stirred up won’t go away for a long, long time, and will deeply poison our politics for many years, but a unified front against him and a huge election defeat will help to tamp it down. It is literally the only moral duty we have as voters.

08.17.16
by

The Duties of the Press in a Truthless Campaign

epimenides-poet

You don’t actually need a paradox to understand Trump’s lies.

In an essay yesterday for The Atlantic, Connor Friedersdorf tackles the question of media bias against Trump, particularly in light of his “Obama founded ISIS” claims. The thrust is that some people are upset that the media was deliberately twisting his words to be their most literal, and therefore their most easily disprovable. I’ll readily admit that when I saw the headline last week during a brief moment of internet connectivity, I rolled my eyes a bit, assuming (oddly, I know) that this was an obvious bit of rhetoric and the palpitations were of the clickbait variety.

Friedersdorf does a good job demolishing that, showing how Trump doubled and tripled down on it, and, most importantly, how he’ll say anything at any given time, to inflame some audiences and then claim he was doing no such thing, and it’s frankly disgusting of you to think otherwise, ok? The basic thrust is that Trump says so many outrageous and insane things (Ted Cruz’s loathsome father killed JFK) that the media has to evaluate everything like a policy statement, and debunk it as such.

It’s an interesting question about the role of the press, and to dig into it, I think it is helpful to look at Chicago politics in the 60s and 70s, at another straight-shooting authoritarian who frequently made no sense: Da Mare, Richard Daley.

Earl Bush, the long-serving press secretary for Richard J. Daley, wasn’t like most of the people surrounding the old man. He wasn’t a Bridgeport crony brought up in the rough-and-tumble world of South Side Irish politics, where loyalty and cunning were prized over book smarts. He was well-educated, and was considered to be “Daley’s translator.” He’s probably best remembered for chiding reporters who covered the mayor to play fair, in a way: “Don’t print what he said. Print what he meant.”

It is a line that’s easy to mock, but it actually raises some interesting questions. Daley was far from dumb, and was himself educated (putting himself through law school while climbing the machine ranks and raising a brood), but he had a tortured relationship with the language. What he meant to say often came out garbled, and nonsensical. So, for reporters covering him, what was there to do? On the one hand, they had a duty to convey the policies and politics of City Hall, and not just get a cheap laugh over a syntactical slip, the kind we all make when speaking, some more so than others. Reading the unedited transcript of nearly anyone can be cringeworthy. On the other hand, seeing the unvarnished mind of our political leaders is a service.

On the other hand, seeing the unvarnished mind of our political leaders is a service. We get to see how their minds work, or don’t, and how much they struggle to connect their talking points with any actual thought (think Marco Rubio here). Sometimes, you get a great quote out of it, one that seems more Freudian than Kinseyian. The best example of this is when Daley said of reports of police brutality in the city: “The policeman is not here to create disorder; he’s here to preserve disorder.” That seemed to encapsulate the role of the police in the racial powderkegs of the 1960s.

On the other hand…you know what he meant. Should reporters gleefully transcribe something that is the opposite of what he meant? The above quote seems to reveal a hidden truth, but that is metaphorical, and not legalistic. If Daley had said “I ordered the police to beat the hell out of the Negro” and then Earl Bush said “no no- he clearly meant to say ‘treat them well, the Negro'”, you print the former, for sure. But when it is just a slipup?  Is making it clear what a subject means a distortion, or is it observance of the truth?

I personally think it is the duty of any reporter to make sure that they print what is meant, even if they report what is said. But what happens when you have a man like Trump? To say he’s a liar is far too faint. All politicians lie (especially when they say they will never lie to you). It’s part of the job. By definition, you have to please far too many competing constituencies to always tell the truth 100% of the time. It’s impossible. And to an extent, we all know that’s acceptable.

But with Trump is is a different thing altogether. He isn’t so much lying as running an entirely 100% truthless campaign. The entire campaign is a fake, of course, an attempt to make someone who couldn’t pass a basic civics test and who can’t be bothered to learn anything about the world into a President. He himself is entirely truthless, as he sees everything in the world in relationship to himself, and interprets it to how it will benefit him and how he can use it as self-aggrandizement. That’s why he can’t go two sentences without bringing it back to himself; his own empty ego is the sole basis of his knowledge.

So the media should do what Connor was getting at: print what he says, and ignore what he pretends to mean. Or, report that too, and show how it is in direct contradiction with what he just said, and repeated. Trump is a man who thinks that being rich alchemizes his idiot proclamations into truth, so run with that. If he says “Obama probably killed MLK”, investigate it, and show how wrong and idiotic Donald Trump is. Don’t let him get away with saying “I never said that, and anyway, when I said it, it was a joke, ok, but I never said it.”  He thinks his off-the-cuff lies are correct when he says them (because he says them) as much as he believes it is correct when he later claims to have never said anything. He gets away with this because he’s been surrounded by flunkies his entire adult life. Every statement is timeless and unalterable truth, until he decides to alter it, and then it was never said. Evaluate them like that. Don’t give him any room. Don’t treat this like normal. Print everything the way it was meant.

 

 

 

08.16.16
by

The Wall Street Journal’s Brazen Trump Cynicism

ap20512607534

You know what makes for the best vacation? Not seeing this guy’s face for a solid week.

Getting back into the swing of things with some low-hanging fruit….

One of the most maddening aspects of our politics is the “style over substance” component; roughly, the “who is saying things better”, as opposed to the “what are they saying” aspect of elections. This dovetails with the obsessive Politico-style horse-race coverage that people have been denouncing for decades, with limited (though not entirely nonexistent) success.

This has ben magnified in the age of Trump, where you have a candidate who spouts wildly-contradictory mumbo-jumbo, and has a relationship with the truth about as solid as one of his marriages. He is someone who feels truth is what he wants it to be, because he’s a spoiled fancylad who surrounds himself with family and grubbing sycophants. So what to do when covering him? For the Wall Street Journal, as with every grasping Republican pol who has tied themselves to him (Paul Ryan), it’s to double down on the style issue, a breathtakingly cynical admission that this is a man completely unqualified to be President.

A Sunday editorial in the Wall Street Journal is the perfect example of this. In what is being praised as a sober and serious consideration of his candidacy, the Journal outlines the problem many supporters have.

They think he should make the election a referendum on Hillary Clinton, not on himself. And they’d like him to spend a little time each day—a half hour even—studying the issues he’ll need to understand if he becomes President.

Is that so hard? Apparently so. Mr. Trump prefers to watch the cable shows rather than read a briefing paper. He thinks the same shoot-from-the-lip style that won over a plurality of GOP primary voters can persuade other Republicans and independents who worry if he has the temperament to be Commander in Chief.

There’s more in this vein, but that’s enough. The Journal then goes on to say this is a winnable race, using math from a political scientist with a great track record, to show that Trump should be winning.

No model is perfect, but Mr. Abramowitz’s has predicted the winner of the major-party popular vote in every presidential election since 1988. His model predicts that Mr. Trump should win a narrow victory with 51.4%. A mainstream GOP candidate who runs a reasonably competent campaign would have about a 66% chance of victory.

(It unfortunately forgets to ask who that mainstream candidate would be: Ted Cruz?)

Then comes the big ask:

If they can’t get Mr. Trump to change his act by Labor Day, the GOP will have no choice but to write off the nominee as hopeless and focus on salvaging the Senate and House and other down-ballot races. As for Mr. Trump, he needs to stop blaming everyone else and decide if he wants to behave like someone who wants to be President—or turn the nomination over to Mike Pence.

There’s a major tell buried in here, a desperate and craven one, and it’s the word “behave”. You see it in every politician, from Mitch to Paul, who have pegged their dreams of a right-wing walkover on this wildly unqualified man. They don’t think he will be a good President. By their own reckoning, as the Journal points out, he’s a shallow, ill-informed, narcissistic disaster, a walking calamity. They aren’t asking him to change; they recognize that’s an impossibility. The man is 70 years old: you think he’s going to suddenly now start being mature?

So that’s the thing. No one thinks that Donald Trump can become a different person. They are saying “Your behavior shows that you are 100% incapable of being the President, but can you, for three months, pretend to be someone different to trick people into voting for you?”  That’s far beyond normal political image-burnishing, and a huge step beyond pandering. This isn’t lipstick on a pig. It’s not even making a Potemkin village. A pig has lips (maybe?), and even a Potemkin village has real people. They are distortions of reality, to hide something ugly. But at their heart, they acknowledge reality, at least enough to try to hide it.

The cynicism behind the “behave better” push is of a different stripe. It’s trying to create a new reality altogether. It isn’t putting lipstick on a pig; it’s saying “here’s a good dinner” while holding up a tray laden only with air. It’s pushing a car full of screaming passengers off a cliff while claiming you are building a new city of the future, right on this spot. This is trying to scrawl out the words “real water” into the rock of the barrenest desert and hope people try to drink it.

The only solace here is that their incredible cynicism is rooted in a laughable and pathetic stupidity. Many (including the WSJ) pin their hopes on something he said in April, a variant on a theme he’s been spinning the whole campaign.

However, they insisted that once voters got to know the real Trump, as opposed to the public face he has presented while campaigning and while hosting the NBC reality show The Apprentice, they will warm to him. He said that person was just an act.

Or, as the Journal quoted:

“At some point I’ll be so presidential that you people will be so bored, and I’ll come back as a presidential person, and instead of 10,000 people I’ll have about 150 people and they’ll say, boy, he really looks presidential,”

This has always been the strategy in everything Trump has done: pretend that he can be someone else and hope people fall for it. “I’m a great businessman”; “I can run the casino business so good”; “I can be Presidential when I want to be.”  For his whole life, he’s convinced people that the obnoxious idiot was an act. It isn’t: the attempt to convince people is the whole act itself, it’s literally all he is good at. It’s worked breathtakingly well, and the desperate in the GOP and its media wing are its latest marks. They don’t believe he’s actually Presidential. They just think that he can fool other people into thinking he is. In doing that, in trying to perpetuate his con, they are its most foolish-looking victims.

08.09.16
by

Talking Turkey: Donald Trump, the Military, and The Coming Constitutional Crisis

Note: I’ll be out of town between the 4th and the 15th, in a wilderness repast, with little to absolutely zero connection to the internet or my phone. Posts during this time, written in advance, will be bigger-picture, or more idiosyncratic, rather than directly pegged to the news. If events happen that supersede or negate anything I say, think of these as a more innocent time capsule. Try not to let the country burn down while I’m gone. 

hp8bdga

Pictured: Trump Tower

One of the phrases that you hear most often when people talk about the possibility of Donald Trump, that calamitous baby, that reject from a frat house treasurer race, is “constitutional crisis.” The idea behind the threat is that our system, with its checks and balances, and respect for the rule of law, can’t handle such a dingbat authoritarian, someone guided entirely by his fascistic whims. This has been argued in many ways,  by the ACLU, by the New York Times, and many others.

The argument about him provoking this crisis isn’t just about his repellent personality, of course, but about the ways in which that personality manifest itself. His “plans”, which are really just the knee-jerk impulses of a dimwit child, include expanding libel laws to crush opposition press, rounding up illegal immigrants, building enormous walls, and reestablishing our immigration policy to discriminate explicitly on the basis of faith.

All of these go against the basic idea of the rule of law, but the argument isn’t always legal. Certainly, lawyers like in the Times and the ACLU make perfectly convincing arguments that his ideas are so blatantly illegal that they will set up the Executive Branch in a state of open warfare with the Judicial Branch, with the Legislative in between, either facilitating his madness or trying tentatively to stop it. It will force us to see how powerful we’ve made the Executive, if a President can truly ride roughshod over anyone in his way. It will be a literal test of the power of the Constitution, to see if it the institutions are strong enough to resist the phony populist strongman.

Continue reading →

08.08.16
by

Trump, The 21st-Century American Fascist

Note: I’ll be out of town between the 4th and the 15th, in a wilderness repast, with little to absolutely zero connection to the internet or my phone. Posts during this time, written in advance, will be bigger-picture, or more idiosyncratic, rather than directly pegged to the news. If events happen that supersede or negate anything I say, think of these as a more innocent time capsule. Try not to let the country burn down while I’m gone. 

ap20512607534

American fascism will not drape itself in glory.

Writing in the New Yorker last month, Adam Gopnik laid to rest the academic debates as to whether or not Donald Trump embodied or promoted fascism.

As I have written before, to call him a fascist of some variety is simply to use a historical label that fits. The arguments about whether he meets every point in some static fascism matrix show a misunderstanding of what that ideology involves. It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form—an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and romantic. It took forms still crazier and more feverishly sinister, if one can imagine, in Romania, whereas under Oswald Mosley, in England, its manner was predictably paternalistic and aristocratic. It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter’s come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy’s.

What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; the worship of power wherever it appears and whoever holds it; contempt for the rule of law and for reason; unashamed employment of repeated lies as a rhetorical strategy; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. It promises to turn back time and take no prisoners.

This is, to me, inarguable. After all, we don’t generally have the same quibbles about communism. It took a different form in the Soviet Union than it did in China than it did in Vietnam than it did in Cuba or Angola. Time and place– which is to say contemporary culture, and the weight of history, and a million other factors– give it shape and form, but everyone agrees roughly what it is (and yes, I am sure that in some academic or leftist circles, there are huge debates about what is authentically communist, and I’d love to read them, but the point stands).

The reluctance to call it what it is springs, I think, from the hideous evils of 20th-century European fascism, and the knowledge that Trump isn’t that bad. It’s also a reluctance to make the Godwin argument. But neither of those are really relevant. If we agree that there is no one definition of fascism, and that it is more a collection of characteristics than a rule book, and that Hitler does not have a monopoly on it, then we should be able to agree that it can, in fact, spring up from anywhere. Even America, even in the 21st-century, and even from someone as singularly inept as Donald Trump. In fact, that’s sort of the point.

Continue reading →

08.02.16
by

“Gonna Be Rigged”: The Next Stage of the Con Steps Toward Violence

 

Classy! Big success. 

 

Donald Trump’s entire career has been a testament to the chicken-in-the-rain stupidity people get when surrounded by money, or at least the trappings of money. Despite being a serial failure, he’s been able to get investors in his bankrupt casinos and optimistic gulls to enroll in his phony school, because he seems really rich. One of the tricks to pulling this off is supreme confidence. People love to see that, and get sucked in. They feel that if this person, who seems rich, is saying “we’re all going to make so much money and we’re going to win” then by gum, we are. It’s seductive.

To say he’s run his campaign as a long con should be a cliche by now (it is on this blog). It’s carried on entirely by brazen lies and force of personality, which, amazingly, many millions of people don’t find ungodly repellant. But what happens when the casinos go bankrupt? What happens when the con is exposed? That’s easy: blame everyone else. Oh, this would have worked if it wasn’t for these people getting in the way or gumming it up. And I’ll tell you what: it’s no accident. They’re jealous, ok? Of our success. But we’ll get them next time. “The game was rigged” is always the cry of the conman when he isn’t able to properly rig it himself. It is absolution and conspiracy, and if successful, draws the mark even closer in.

If it is successful in an election, though, it could lead to violence and discontent like few of us have seen in our lifetimes. That’s the game Trump is playing now, and we’re all on the board.

Continue reading →

08.01.16
by

Trump and the Khans: Two Tweets That Tell You All You Need To Know

gop-2016-trump_jack

What, me, act like a reasonable human being? 

The news flowed hot and ridiculous over the weekend, as Donald Trump decided that he was forced to break his stoically heroic day-long silence about Humayun Khan and his family. Khan of course was the soldier killed in Iraq, whose parents, Khizr and Ghazala, spoke so eloquently and forcefully at the convention on Thursday. They provided probably the finest moment of either convention, laying out the case why Trump’s reckless racism was anti-American, and why he was too terrible a person to even be considered for the top job. Needless to say, Trump couldn’t let this stand. So he attacked the family, claiming

Needless to say, Trump couldn’t let this stand. So he attacked the family, claiming the the mother wasn’t allowed to speak (and how flippantly bigoted and childishly-speculative is that?). He accused Khizer of reading from a script Hillary’s people wrote, and said he had “no right to stand in front of millions of people” and attack Trump. As the weekend wore on, the Khans (both of them) became more and more forceful about the wretched character of this miserable person.

The key to understanding the whole thing isn’t Trump’s bigotry, per se, but in his need to react. If you want to understand how deeply unserious and un-Presidential this man is, his Sunday morning tweet is enough.

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

I was viciously attacked by Mr. Khan at the Democratic Convention. Am I not allowed to respond? Hillary voted for the Iraq war, not me!

8:32 AM – 31 Jul 2016
That, by itself, should be enough to convince people that he isn’t deserving of any vote, much less the majority. Forget that he was responding to the parents of a Gold Star hero. It’s his unshakable notion that no one, anywhere, is allowed to say a bad word about him. That if he is attacked he has to be able to strike back, regardless of the circumstance. That is anyone is “vicious” to him, it’s not just his right, but his duty to antagonize them back.
That’s madness. You know who gets “viciously attacked” quite a bit? The President. Obama does, for sure. Do you see him responding every time someone smears his character? You know who else did? George W. Bush, who also kind of let things roll off him. Same with Bill Clinton, George HW, etc. Every President, every politician, everywhere, is attacked. Part of the job is ignoring it. Part of being a grownup is ignoring it.
But that’s not Trump. He’s a 70-yr-old child, because no one has ever said no to him. He’s titanically arrogant and wildly insecure. He feels that being “allowed” to respond, which as a citizen of course he is, means that he should respond. He can’t handle the slightest provocation, because he feels that anyone who pokes at him gets close to revealing the pathetic, calamitous baby that he truly is.
Another tweet from just this morning, after he’s been getting savaged for two days for his insane behavior, read “Mr. Khan, who does not know me, viciously attacked me from the stage of the DNC and is now all over T.V. doing the same. Nice!” There’s a lot to unpack there as well, mostly the idea that Trump should be immune to criticism from people who don’t know him, which is a little antithetical to the idea of a citizen’s relationship to power. Mostly though it’s the “Nice!”, that sarcastic sort of “can you believe this guy?” It’s all unfair, you know. Why should a man like Trump have to put up with this?
This isn’t an act, and it isn’t a political strategy. It’s who he is. He feels that being rich and powerful should make people cower before him, and if they don’t, well, woe betide them. And the more powerful he gets, the less criticism he should receive, and the more he should use his power to shut critics up by attacking them and unleashing his followers to do the same. To say that this in inimical to our beliefs is understatement, and to say his thumpish fake machismo is an inversion of the Khan’s actual courage is obvious on its face.
Forget that he is retaliating against the parents of a fallen soldier. Forget that he is going after private citizens. Forget that they were 100% correct in their attacks. That he feels the need at all to respond tells you everything you need to know about this man’s twisted, spoiled, ludicrous character. This might actually begin to sink in now. We an only hope.
07.28.16
by

Quick Hits On Trump’s Press Conference: Non-Russian Edition

 

Might be the next President

 

Until the convention, Donald Trump’s insane and near-treasonous bafflegab of a presser yesterday dominated the news, especially his call for Russia to interfere with our election. That’s been pretty thoroughly covered elsewhere, so I want to make a few additional comments. I know writing about something some 20 hours after the fact is way too late, but I don’t think this news cycle should be over. There was so much in that press conference that defied imagination. It deserves to be talked about again and again, because, remember: this man could be President.

No way to get to it all now, but I want to highlight not specific policy things, because there are none except “Russia’s fine, ok?”. Instead I want to point out just how impossibly shallow this man is. The statements on Russia might have, as many said, “disqualify” him from the Presidency in a moral sense. But the rest of the words show that isn’t qualified, in the professional sense, to teach 3rd-grade social studies. He refuses to learn even the basics about the world, and can’t get through more than a tweet-length of a sentence without

He refuses to learn even the basics about the world, and can’t get through more than a tweet-length of a sentence without doubling-back, repeating himself, resorting to the verbal tricks of agreeing with himself, or (most often) self-aggrandizing. Insane anti-democratic fascistic tendencies aside, he’s really the most baffling incomprehensible public figure we’ve ever seen. Sarah Palin knew more about the world.

Continue reading →

07.27.16
by

Julian Assange Casts His Vote

88092635_013873333-1

His vote will ultimately be worth more than yours.

When you’re thinking free and open society, you’re thinking Donald Trump, right?

Six weeks before the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks published an archive of hacked Democratic National Committee emails ahead of the Democratic convention, the organization’s founder, Julian Assange, foreshadowed the release — and made it clear that he hoped to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency.

(The Times immortally invaluable Charlie Savage put this all together)

So, one could have initially, if one ignored the Russian angle cast this as an attempt to throw a corrupt and evil “democracy”, the world’s great evil and enemy of freedom, into a state of real higgedly-piggedly. But that’s clearly not the case.

Mr. Assange replied that what Mr. Trump would do as president was “completely unpredictable.” By contrast, he thought it was predictable that Mrs. Clinton would wield power in two ways he found problematic.

First, citing his “personal perspective,” Mr. Assange accused Mrs. Clinton of having been among those pushing to indict him after WikiLeaks disseminated a quarter of a million diplomatic cables during her tenure as secretary of state.

“We do see her as a bit of a problem for freedom of the press more generally,” Mr. Assange said.

I’m going to ignore the middle part, where he is mad at Mrs. Clinton for moving to indict him after, you know, breaking the law. I get why he sees her as an enemy, but did that really come as a surprise? Regardless of what you think of the justice or efficacy of the Wikileaks diplomatic dump (and I think they are a different type than Snowden’s heroism), it stands to reason that the US government would be miffed. I get why Assange sees her as an enemy, but really, shouldn’t take it so personally.

It’s the first and third bits that are either idiotically naive or completely sinister, depending on where you stand on Assange. Seeing Clinton as “a bit of a problem for freedom of the press” is fair: the Obama Administration has a terrible track record on press freedom, and Hillary has never been known for her openness, exactly. I think being peeved at the cable dumping, in which legitimate diplomatic communication was exposed and lives were put in danger, doesn’t in and of itself mark her as an enemy. But I get it.

However, the contrast is, and was known at the time Assange made these statements (about six weeks ago) Donald Trump. Donald Trump. Donald Trump. He’s made it…very clear where he stance on the media, the role of antagonistic journalism, and the role of the press in a free society, which is: fuck the press. If they aren’t subservient to him, they are useless. He’s shown it in his willingness to excommunicate anyone who is “unfair” (by which we mean fair) to him.  He’s shown it on his ravaging Twitter feed, where he demonstrates that trying to keep the media in line is a bigger goal than talking about policy or anything else. This tweet— “I was at and met Juan Williams in passing. He asked if he could have pictures taken with me. I said fine. He then trashes on air!”– is a perfect example of his childish authoritarianism.

Not all his authoritarianism is childish and petulant (though really, aren’t those the emotions at the heart of tyranny?). He has made it very clear that he intends to, or at least wants to, “open up libel laws” so that he can sue unfriendly press out of existence. He’s been trying to do that for decades. One could argue the pursuit of this power is one of the driving goals of his Presidency. So even he won’t be able to open up libel laws, as that wouldn’t come close to holding up in court, he’s clearly a man who wants to quash press freedom, either de facto or de jure, in order to burnish his own heroic image. Not exactly an ally of an open society.

So when Assange says Trump is “completely unpredictable”, he’s lying, or else he’s not paying any attention, which doesn’t strike me as plausible. Trump has made it very clear he’s a huge fan of waterboarding, and of even more torture. He’s been clear about that his entire run. That Assange chooses to ignore that, and, worse, accommodate it, raises a few questions about motivations.

The charitable interpretation here is that Trump is an agent of chaos, will rattle America, will end the neoliberal agreement that is underpinning much of the world’s immorality. He’s ignorant about who Trump actually is, and underestimates the racism and nativism that undergirds the campaign, focusing on globalization and isolationism.

That’s actually dovetailed with the uncharitable interpretation, which is that Assange sees the US/EU as the real enemies, and any of their enemies– including the ruthless and literal-press-murdering Putin regime– as his friends. That’s pretty sinister, but when someone sets himself against one party, in this case the war-mongering, trade-hawking, and press-stifling US (and all these are legitimate charges!), he tends to cling to any port in the storm.

You are free to question if he is pro-freedom, merely anti-West and pro-Russia, pro-authoritarianism if it’s the right person, or anywhere in between. I don’t think there is a cut-and-dry answer, though I lean toward him being a bit of an authoritarian creep with libertarian clothes. All I know for sure is that with friends like these, freedom doesn’t need the many enemies it already has.

07.26.16
by

Grasping Toward a Cohesive 21st-Century Trump and Russia Story

 

The man playing the real high-stakes game

 

I’ve spent a long time arguing on the blog that Trump’s campaign is not a grift, but a con— that is, it has defined goals (the Presidency), but is getting there by pretending to be a campaign. I think the slapdash family affair that was the RNC showed that to be pretty true, but what I didn’t realize is that he is also a mark. He’s being played by Vladimir Putin, who is playing a much bigger game.

Franklin Foer, Josh Marshall, and Max Boot (among others) have done a great job of laying out in detail the ties between Trump Tower and the Kremlin, a sentence I can’t believe I even wrote.  The problem is that it is hard to really tell what certain motivations are, and which horse is leading which cart. Let’s lay out some facts/suppositions. (Info from these links, and from other sources like The Times and Foreign Policy)

  1. The Trump campaign is deeply in bed with Putin’s Russia. Paul Manafort worked for Putin’s Ukranian proxy, Paul Flynn is a close friend of Putin and has advocated for Russia’s regional rights, his top FP advisor, Carter Page, has ties to Gazprom, and has given speeches in Russia advocating for the US to back off.
  2. Trump himself relies on Russian banks and Russian money to do business, since a lot of American banks won’t touch him anymore, on account of him being a disastrously bad businessman and a terrible bet.
  3. It is pretty clear by now that Russia has had direct involvement in the American election to try to sow more chaos in the DNC. They have more emails, and more hacks, and everyone is waiting with a nauseous fear to see what Russia, with its useful stooge Wikileaks, will do next. That a couple of neckbeards booed Elizabeth Warren is the big story rather than Russian interference on behalf of a candidate says quite a bit.
  4. The Trump campaign let social conservatives run wild over the party platform, including lunatic things like gay conversion therapy (which I guarantee you Trump doesn’t care about), but interfered to water down language about supporting Ukranian opposition to the Russian invasion/annexation of Crimea.
  5. In addition to Crimea, his most coherent FP statement is that, more or less, every country should fend for itself. He couches it in the language of business– we’ll help them if they pay us– but if there is anything in the ballpark of a coherent foreign policy it is that no one is in this together. Needless to say, that means that larger countries will dominate the smaller ones.

#5, by the way, happens to be Russia’s main foreign policy: dominating their “sphere of influence” (think a colder Monroe Doctrine for the 21st-century). For Putin, anyplace that was a Soviet state, or was at least under the Soviet thumb, should be gravitationally attracted toward Russia. Russia should be able to dictate their fates, who they buy oil and gas from, what their foreign policy will be, and more. That’s why they are so livid at the Baltics joining NATO, or the Ukraine or Georgia looking west. Our putting out thumbs on the scale is seen as tantamount to war. That’s their FP: control the near abroad.

To be fair, it is hypocritical to say that they have “no right” to do so, since America certainly tries to, and tries to control the far abroad as well. But in terms of competing sectors of influence, it isn’t unfair to say that we encourage countries to fall into the US/EU/NATO sector. If Russia thinks power politics are the main game, they have to know that losing is an option.

Ah, but what if it doesn’t have to be an option? What if America had a President like this:

  • Who was essentially incurious about the world?
  • Who, insofar as he was interested, leaned toward strongmen and bullies?
  • Whose native instincts were to pull back and not help anyone else except in the absolute narrowest definition of self-interest?
  • Whose native instincts were inherently racist, and so hated any projects (the EU, immigration) that might foster integration?
  • Who had a lifelong admiration for people who felt the same way?
  • Who was incredibly susceptible to flattery by the powerful?
  • Who felt that business and political power should be inherently intertwined?
  • Who could be swayed by the riches of Russia?

That’s um…well, not to put my thumbs on the scales, but I think we have something here. Hint: it isn’t Hillary Clinton.

I don’t think Putin is funding Trump’s campaign, nor do I think the two are strategizing. Trump isn’t the Manchurian candidate. However, he is the perfect candidate for Russia’s vision of the world: a world of spheres, of dividing the near enemy in Europe, of making as many countries as possible reliant on Russian resources. It’s a world of walls and of anti-immigrant posters rattling by torchlight. It’s a world where international organizations are nonentities, so for any protection, countries have to do the bidding of the near and strong.

This is a world were thuggish psuedodemocrats (like Putin and Orban and Trump) form teams where they get rich through the rawest of power politics. This is what Trump believes, and he’s surrounded himself with people who feel the same way. I doubt this is by design. It is probably partly by temperament, but more by suggestions from people like Paul Manafort, who knows how the game is played.

This reveals a far more dangerous side of Trump. Everything he does is a threat to the Constitutional order, but it took me a while to realize that he himself was being played by far darker forces. Trump has the idea that whatever he does is genius. People like Manafort, who have actual goals, will ride this fearmongering and racism and hatred and blithering incoherence as far as it will go, telling him he’s brilliant, and steering him in a pro-Putin direction. They know they have the perfect idiot who believes his own clippings (indeed, that’s all he reads).

This isn’t to say that he isn’t an American fascist. He is. His melding of the personal and the political into a garish abattoir, a reality freak show, is the perfect expression of the 21st-century, and exactly how fascism would form in the here and now. His ideas of the world are a 21st-century reaction to the ills of modernity, of the dislocation, mixed with a lifetime of racism and self-aggrandizement. He’s extremely dangerous on his own. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t also being played, being manipulated by people with a larger game, who recognize that he can be a useful clown. Trump, with his snarling ridiculousness, is the perfect American counterpart for the growing anti-Europe axis: the fool who thinks he is the king.