Tag Archives: Trump

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.

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.

 

06.23.16
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Brexit, Trump, and The New Dislocation

 

Make Great Britain, well, great again!

 

As I type this, ITV (through C-Span) is reporting that the Leave campaign is cruising toward a victory, with an 85% chance at victory. By the time I’m done, it could be a done deal. All night- or in the wee hours, if you are reading this in the immediately impacted areas- the results started to trickle toward the red, toward Leave. Wales, which has benefited enormously from the EU, while still suffering thanks to its postindustrial wreckage, was almost entirely and passionately Leave. England, with a resurgence of nationalism, went heavily toward an exit. Only Scotland kept it from being a total rout.

ITV just called it. It’s over. Brexit is a reality, and the world is a far different place.

It’s been a season of weirdness, on both sides of the ocean, two countries tied umbilically together. For as much as we pretend to be different, and as much as we are, there are real similarities, and they are bubbling to the surface, like some kind of deeply buried and seismically awakened sludge, in this year of simmering discontent and atavistic anger.

It’s impossible to discount what is happening. Throughout the night, there were references to the “white working class”, in cities like Manchester and Cardiff and throughout Wales, and how the Remain camp failed to persuade them that they are better off in a united Europe. I honestly don’t know if that is true they would be, though I suspect it is. But the argument is the same as it is here.

In the US, Trump is essentially in the Leave camp. I mean, he very literally is, having supported it (once he was told what it was). But instinctively, even if he didn’t know what it was, he knew, in his dark heart. He knew that “Leave” encompassed his entire campaign. The heart of Trumpism is a desire to leave the modern world. It’s a desire to leave a world where what once seemed certain and permanent (even if it was only a few generations old) was rapidly changing. It’s a desire to leave the world of complexity and uncertainty and retreat toward blood and soil. It’s the call to retreat disguised as victory.

And yes, that is a powerful message for many, left out of the global economy, punished by market forces that are beyond their control, but clearly in control of those who benefit. It’s a message that resonates because, while it blames “elites”, it really turns anger on those who are weaker (immigrants, Muslims, etc). It’s an extremely seductive howl, a lowing, lusty battle dirge. It accepts failure, but gives in to the desire to burn the world down with it. It’s the truncheon of the race riot manifest in the ballot box.

Both campaigns- Trump and Leave- have had violence as their main currency, or, if not the actual currency, the silver and gold that gives it value. Because when you tell people their country is under attack, and not just from immigrants, but from their children, and their grandchildren (as Satelan chillingly documents), and that they are being enabled by what are essentially quisling politicians, well, then what choice does a patriot have. It’s what led to the murder of Jo Cox. It’s what drives Trump’s supporters, like this terrifying racist. It’s not a policy. It’s sheer emotion.

This emotion is driven by modern dislocation. Yes, we’ve had immigration and a shifting balance of power for decades (it’s still mostly white, and male, but it is shifting). And yes, the UK has been in the EU for decades. But this is still relatively new. Before really the end of WWII an actual political alliance with France would have been insane. Even WWI was more out of the inconsistent European alliances that formed in the wake of Napolean. You don’t have many Englishman who remember France as an enemy, and the Continent as a wholly foreign place, but the memory remains. The memory of Empire remains, as it does, in another form, in America. This loss of identity, tied in with the shifting balance of power through immigration, assimilation, and expanded civil rights, is coupled with the very real economic dislocation of globalization. It all feels like a loss of power, and the personal and political can intertwine easily.

The memory of being on top is still powerful, and can be reanimated up by canny politicians who know how to stir up the blood that has dried in the soil. With sweaty passion and crocodile tears they gift life back into the blood, making it rich and liquid in a suddenly loamy soil, from which can sprout thousands of pairs of thick-booted feet, marching in unison to an old-fashioned martial beat.

It’s transoceanic, baby. Donald Trump doesn’t know anything about the world, but we’re living in his image.

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.

06.17.16
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Trump Campaign Isn’t A Grift, It’s A Con

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If we want to make America great again, we have to go back to a time when our conmen were handsome and charming!

There’s been a lot of talk since Trumps started his run if this was just a ploy to boost his business. This was most ably stated by President Obama in the White House Correspondents Dinner in May, scolding the press for overhyping him. “The guy wanted to give his hotel business a boost and now we are praying that Cleveland makes it through July.”  The thrust of this is that he just wanted publicity, started winning, and it overtook him.

The correlation to this theory is that he doesn’t actually want to be President, which is why he is sabotaging himself with bizarre rants and a refusal to actually do anything it takes to be President. He’s worried about his business interests and wants to get out. This is exemplified in the Politico report where he had 20 top donors to call, called three, got bored, and stopped. He’s unserious, the thinking goes, because he doesn’t want to be President. He’s sabotaging himself.

The idea that it is a grift was furthered this week by unsubstantiated reports that he was looking to set up a TV station. He had riled up the rubes, using his undeniable skills as a demagogue, and then is going to drop out and get more money doing things his way. The whole thing was a grift that got taken too seriously, and now we’re faced with an openly white nationalist campaign.

Overlooking how scary that aspect is- and even overlooking, for the moment, what it says about our country and the Republican Party that such an obvious grift (if that is what it was) could have won, I think he need to come up with a more unified theory of Trump. His campaign isn’t a grift. It’s a con, and always has been.

There’s a slight difference there. A grift is to engage in petty theft, to take money pretty much outright, with no other goal. Sarah Palin’s whole career in the national spotlight has been a grift. If Trump were just doing this for his business, or to get a TV show, it would have been the merest (and biggest) grift.

I don’t think that’s what it was. I think he thinks he can be President, and thinks it is the best outlet for his petty grievances, his desire to punish enemies, to control people, and to propitiate his massive ego. It’s also a way to pursue the racism and anti-foreigner bias he’s harbored his whole life. He’s not interested in acting as the President, just being him. And, it is good for business as well.

So that’s the con they’ve been running: pretending to want to be a good President just so he can be President, if that makes sense. The goal was the further the Trump brand and let the boss have all the power in the world. So they ran it like a con: promising to be so Presidential later on, promising to raise money, saying they had the money, claiming they gave money to troops, and treating his campaign like any of his other businesses: an opportunity to tell people lies that they’ll believe, not deliver, and then tell them more lies. They’ll be so deep in the hole in their (financial, emotional, partisan) investment that they can’t back out. The long con, getting power, is based on a series of small cons that ensnare the gullible. Trump’s excellent at it.

He’s also excellent at getting out and letting other suckers hold the bag, which is why I think the self-sabotage theories have some validity. I think most of the damage is the fact that his is a lily-fingered narcissist who can pull things over on a lot of people, but not everyone at once, and whose ugliness and ill-tempered paranoia is exposed in the summer sun. But I do think he kind of wants to get out. His whole scheme his whole life has been to build a house of cards and then get out before the collapse, leveraging himself deeply, using one project to finance another one, stiffing creditors, and making money.

So now that he has historically terrible numbers, he can see the writing on the wall, and I think he might be looking for a reason to be treated “very unfairly” so he can leave, and pretend he’s a winner, and make more money off of the rubes. The TV thing is plausible, because the mark of a good con is to have a lot of outs.

But I don’t think this will happen. This is the biggest con of his life, and it has been amazing, in a terrible and godless sort of way. The heat of a Presidential campaign can give the feeling of power and destiny to even a dedicated public servant like Bernie Sanders. Imagine what it has done to Trump. I bet he thinks he can still pull off this huge con, because for god’s sake, he’s Trump. It’s what he does.

The one nice thing about this is that, possibly, it will all come down, be exposed, and he’ll be humiliated and revealed to all but the diehards for what he is. A cheap swindler whose only core beliefs are enriching himself and hating non-whites. It’s usually when you reach too high that the con gets brought down. Just ask Doyle Lonnegan.

06.17.16
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Bernie Staying In; Hillary’s Savvy, Billionaire Fight, and More Political Quick Hits

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  • There is a trace amount of frustration, and even panic, in Bernie Sanders not taking the time yesterday to drop out and endorse Hillary. But that’s fine. He did the right thing. In not dropping out, he can continue to grow his left coalition, and keep pressure on for the Fight for $15, other labor issues, and everything else related to inequality. He pledged to make sure Trump doesn’t win, which precludes a lengthy run. And by telling his supporters that he knows “we must continue our grassroots efforts to create the America that we know we can become.” This is smart- building on the local and state levels, continuing with that energy, working to make a more progressive platform, and eventually reconciling differences with Clinton that turn into an endorsement. You can see the “We had serious differences, but over the last few months we have made our voice heard, and I can state that I unequivocally vote for Hillary Clinton, etc”.  This makes it seem- correctly!- like Bernie and his supporters will have a big influence. There will be a very small “sellout!” crowd, but those will mostly be people who were attracted to politics as a form of self-expression, a way to show that they were the real rebels, and whom identity as leftier-than-thou was more important than then actual election.
  • Speaking of that, unless something comes out that Bernie backstabbed Hillary, kudos to her for recognizing the passion of the Sanders campaign, and making sure that they can be eased off the hook. If Bernie’s speech was the result of an agreement at their meeting, she played this very well. It’s hard for a politician who has won to not spike the football a bit, but not only is she being gracious, she’s letting Bernie go out on roughly his own terms. This is really smart politics, and speaks very highly of her character.
  • Billionaire fight! Billionaire fight! Writing in The Financial Times, (behind paywall, Re/Code recap here) big-time VC Michael Moritz tears Trump apart for his phony business schemes, his fake narrative, and how he “seems little more than a hustler who takes from the rich (lenders he has short-changed, partners he has sued) and also takes from the poor (hapless students of Trump University, tenants whom he has allegedly bullied).” He praises the same immigrants who Trump has denigrated for being the real winners, people who came with nothing and made something of themselves, like Andy Grove or Jerry Yang. He also picks a side in the Trump/Bezos spat, in which Trump has revoked the WaPo’s access and threatened to use the power of the IRS and other government agencies to go after Bezos. It’s a tribute to Trump’s utter loathsomeness that you instinctively side with Bezos, instead of the normal reaction, which is “fuck Jeff Bezos”.
  • Speaking of jerks, hey guys, John McCain is running for office this year! It means that any reasonableness he might have is completely launched out the window and he once again reveals himself to be the grasping, desperate, unprincipled and self-righteous huckster he is. He can’t side tooooo close to Trump on most issues, because Hispanics do exist in Arizona, but he certainly doesn’t want to get tooooo far away either, because white racists make up his base, so what to do? Oh yeah- ISIS is Obama’s fault for not keeping and indefinite amount of American troops in Iraq indefinitely. This makes him directly responsible for Orlando, which was a devious ISIS plot. That’s the way to show steady leadership, John!  You can deconstruct a lot of right-wing lunacy, and the weird moonscape of their mentality, just from this. Maybe it deserves its own post.
06.15.16
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Trump and “Crooked”, Thieving Soldiers: I Mean, He’s Sort of Right

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“Oh, good, the news is on!” -Donald Trump

So Donald Trump in a rally yesterday took the politically…unusual step of accusing American service men and women of theft in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Iraq, crooked as hell,” Trump told a crowd in Greensboro, North Carolina. “How about bringing baskets of money – millions and millions of dollars – and handing it out? I wanna know, who are the soldiers that had that job? Because I think they’re living very well right now, whoever they may be.”

This isn’t the first time he’s gone down this road, either.

“They were going through Afghanistan paying off, I want to know who were the soldiers that are carrying cash of 50 million dollars? Cash! How stupid are we?” he said at a September rally. “I wouldn’t be surprised those soldiers, I wouldn’t be surprised if the cash didn’t get there, I have to be honest.”

His spokewoman, the impeccably-named Hope Hicks (turn out to vote), said that he was referring to Iraqi soldiers stealing the money, a rare case of cover-your-ass by the campaign, because this seems to be the one area in which he fears to tread. Accusing our boys and girls of being thieves? That’s suicide. But he clearly didn’t mean Iraqis. One, they weren’t given the bags full of money, and two, well:

“More than 100 enlisted military personnel have been convicted of stealing funds, bribery, and contract rigging while deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, crimes the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity valued at $52 million in a 2015 report.”

So, yeah- Trump was right. Maybe exaggerating, certainly a wild conspiratorialist, imagining these veterans living large and laughing at us simps, but still, this did happen. And more so, it points to the insanity of these wars, the incredible waste of money (and of course lives, and honor, and any possibility of even weak regional stability, but let’s stick with money). We spent close to two trillion dollars in Iraq, a lot of it to crooked contractors who inflated prices building a simulacrum of safe areas in the Green Zone. We rented out war priorities to mercenaries. We relentlessly bribed leaders who could turn on us the next day without more bribes.

And that’s why this is the third rail. We can talk about the war in Iraq being a “mistake”, and most of the country is in agreement, but getting into why it was a mistake is dangerous ground. We never talk about the outsourcing of fighting, and we never talk about how the war was driven by money, but paid for in blood. (Here I don’t mean that Bush went to war to make money for his friends, but it was an inevitable outcome of bad intentions).  It was cheap and tacky and cruel, and there is no doubt that its cheap and tacky and cruel nature influenced people who were there, these little pieces flung around with bags of money. Why can’t they have a taste? Everyone else is.

To look at why there was so much corruption is to understand that everywhere our economic system touches becomes just as corrupt. So we gasp when someone insinuates such a thing about the military, whom we’ve mostly all agreed to never criticize. That’s partly understandable, of course, but also dangerous. Not just because it excuses when they do something wrong, but to admit that the military, our boys and girls in uniform, can be corrupted is to look at the whole system in a bare and unflattering hanging-bulb light.

So it is weird that Donald Trump, who never met a lie he didn’t like, and vigorously defend even when every fact in opposition is thrust in his face, accidentally stumbles on to a truth. It’s even more telling that this is the one in which he immediately backtracks.