Tag Archives: Trump

05.12.16
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“Until we find out what’s going on” Continues To Be Official Trump Policy

 

Pictured: John Kerry?

Remember when John Kerry was permanently labeled a “flip-flopper” thanks to a smart Bush team and an enabling press, who, with few exceptions, loved the label, adopted it, and breathlessly discussed it? It was fine to discuss his positions and character, of course, but any normal political act was instantly labeled another “flip-flop” by a press almost sexually enamored of a swaggering war President.

That’s normally how things work. Labels get stuck because the press is lazy and people easily accept quick caricatures in place of actual characterization. Bush was dumb (instead of arrogantly incurious), Gore was boring and a liar (instead of neither), McCain was grouchy (true!), Obama was aloof and arrogant (kind of true), etc. That’s the way it usually works.

That’s why one of the more genuinely frightening things about this election is that it has revealed, once and for all, the power of pure thuggishness in the face of any rationality. It’s why no labels have really stuck on Donald Trump. The rage he channels is enough to flatten the incredible contradictions, reversals, and sheer ignorance that underpins his campaign, like a boiling river leveling a hapless and god-beseeching floodplain town. His position on terrorism, or rather “terrorism”, makes this clear.

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05.04.16
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Trump and The Military; Or, What To Expect When You’re Expecting a 1000-Year Reign of Terror

In comments on Monday, which were little noticed, given the sturm und drang of the coming End Times, Donald Trump gave yet another preview of what his administration would be like. It was a statement so shocking in both its reflexive authoritarianism and wild-eyed improvisational ignorance, as well as misguided deification, that it should have sunk a normal campaign. That it was barely-discussed shows exactly where we are. This is from The Military Times, but hat-tip to Foreign Policy‘s Situation Report for pointing it out.

If he becomes commander in chief, Donald Trump won’t let military generals speak to “the dishonest press,” out of fear they’ll spill national security secrets.

“I don’t want them saying things like ‘our nation has never been so ill-prepared.’ Even though it’s true, I don’t want the enemy knowing that.”“A general should not be on television,” the Republican front-runner told a crowd of supporters during a rally at Carmel, Indiana, on Monday. “I don’t want our generals on television. I will prohibit them.

“I don’t want them going on television,” he said. “You think Gen. George Patton or Gen. Douglas MacArthur, do you think they’d be on television saying about how weak we are?

“Number one, they wouldn’t be on television because they’d be knocking the hell out of the enemy and they wouldn’t have time.”

Pentagon officials have held multiple public press conferences with high-ranking officers in the last few weeks, including a trio of events discussing operations in Iraq and a briefing by Gen. Joseph Votel, head of U.S. Central Command.

Military leaders have said the goal of such events is to keep the public updated on military news.They frequently dismiss questions related to specific movements or strategic decisions.

Let’s look at this for exactly what it is.

  1. Part of it is garden-variety “real Americans vs. the press” nonsense, but a little deeper, it is the idea, popular among the right, that the military and (especially) the intelligence services are excused from the normal daily grind of functioning in a democratic and open society.
  2. It’s misleading and dishonest demagoguery, pretending that the devious press is forcing generals to reveal battle plans, which if true (it’s not) speaks ill of the generals, but that part is weirdly elided in order to create an enemy.
  3. It’s not just that Trump wants to keep information from the public. It’s that he doesn’t want anyone talking to the press because then he can’t fully control the message. This is a man who always wants to muzzle anyone working for him. There is only one voice, and that is Trumps. If they aren’t going to praise “Mr. Trump” then they can’t talk. This is the mentality he’ll bring to the Oval Office.
  4. It’s wildly, insanely wrong. Anyone who thinks that Patton, or by god McArthur, avoided press has no concept as history, and sees it as nothing more than an idealized hagiography of Strong White Men. Patton and McArthur here are actually “Patton” and “McArthur”, not real people, but flawless ideals of when men were men, and we didn’t let any treacherous press or pusillanimous politicians or women keep us from knocking heads.

For some reason Trump gets a weird pass because everyone knows he’s just making it up as he goes along, but it comes from a very understandable and predictable mindset, one which we’ve seen throughout history. It’s selling a veneration of a fake past and the idea that there is only one person who can bring back that toughness, that iron and steel. Trump is part of a long line of demagogues, a movement that has been around forever, was amplified by the rise of radio and TV, and can gain further steam thanks to the rise of idiot celebrity culture and social media, of which he is a master. We have to take every statement at face value, and expose it for the terrifying truth of what it actually is.

05.04.16
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A Farewell To Cruz, And A Warm Hello To The Reign of Locusts


And the great day of wrath has come
And here’s mud in your big red eye
The poker’s in the fire
And the locusts take the sky

-Tom Waits, Earth Died Screaming

I mean, in a just world, seeing Ted Cruz fail would be cause for celebration, right? This hateful messianic, the culmination of every rotten political trend of the last 40 years, this embodiment of a movement that screechingly defines itself entirely as opposition to progress, this sneering elitist, this violent bigot, the nihilistic self-serving fraud: his sadness and defeat should be a time for joy.

But it isn’t, because 1) for god’s sake, that means Trump, and 2) he’ll be back, claiming in 2020 that he was defeated by a liberal billionaire who hijacked the party. Oddly, I’ll turn this over to Ross Douthat, who has written what I think are the two best paragraphs of his tenure at the Times (if you can ignore how he helped, in his fundamentally sad way, to enable these trends by attempting to put a nice Catholic spin on the snarling hatred underneath).

Cruz will be back, no doubt. He’s young, he’s indefatigable, and he can claim — and will claim, on the 2020 hustings — that True Conservatism has as yet been left untried. But that will be a half-truth; it isn’t being tried this year because the Republican Party’s voters have rejected him and it, as they rejected another tour for Bushism when they declined to back Rubio and Jeb.

What remains, then, is Trumpism. Which is also, in its lurching, sometimes insightful, often wicked way, a theory of what kind of party the Republicans should become, and one that a plurality of Republicans have now actually voted to embrace.

And so the Great Day of Wrath has come. The Party is Trump; Trump is the Party. L’état est orange. And while I agree with the experts that he doesn’t have much of a chance- it’s hard to when without getting votes from blacks, or Latinos, or women*- who the hell can say? We’ve entered the time of the seriously Weird. There is nothing normal about this. This will be the single-most dangerous nomination in American history. Even if he loses, enormously, this will be written in history books as the time America embraced sheer unvarnished hatred as a replacement for anything good, decent, or intelligent. It isn’t like Romney or McCain or (god knows) George Bush or Reagan appealed to the head, but they tempered their pleas to the angry and disaffected jackals with some human decency.

That isn’t Trump’s way. There has been nothing in his campaign that has had any substance, unless you think a raging chemical fire is something that can be held and cherished. We’ve seen a few campaigns like this in our history, like Pat Buchanan, who surprised people by doing fairly well in primaries. But they’ve never won. This is uncharted territory for America. It is not normal. It is not just upsetting. It is genuinely terrifying, and even a nutcrushing loss in November will only partially mitigate the effects. What Trump has unleashed will be barking madly down our streets for decades to come.

 

*What will be exciting is the first time Trump or a pundit says that Hillary is running a “divisive” campaign and only “appealing to special interest groups” by winning with everyone except older white people. They’re the only baseline, god dammit!

05.03.16
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Indiana Tuesday: It’s All Over But The Guttural Howling of Diseased Sewer Rats

On most mornings, if I’m not feeling too lazy, I have the privilege of walking along Lake Michigan, up here in Evanston, where the southernmost portion of this vast and ferocious lake system begins its final curve. This morning it was incredibly clear and impossibly still, where there isn’t the slightest movement in the air, nothing to stop the rising sun from gently pushing away the final hint of the dawn’s early chill.

On a morning like today, Chicago’s stunning skyline looms in all its roaring glory. And past that, further southeast, where the lake curves, you can make out the hulking outline of one of the giant Great Lakes freight ships, leaving the port on the far south side. And beyond that, beyond what is usually hidden by clouds, you can just barely make out a puff of smoke rising from the sprawling industrial areas of Indiana, that bizarre and wrecked land where hints of ancient prairie still poke out among the post-industrial poverty, the rows of tumbledown houses and cracked roads, the cheap glitz of casinos, the belching smokestacks, and the sunshine, normally shrouded by haze, that glints and shatters on dirty rivers. It’s here, the far bitter end of the rust belt, where the American dream first crashed and broke, where the horrible forces of the global economy first poisoned then wrecked a land and people. And it’s here, in Indiana, where Donald Trump, the gaseous avatar of America’s inchoate anger, can all but clinch the most terrifying nomination in our nation’s history.

whiting-in-wide-shot-smalljpg

“Is this hell?” “No, it’s Indiana”

Read more about Indiana and the end of the line

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05.02.16
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Game of Thrones, Contested Conventions, and the Death of Surprise

(SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for last night’s Game of Thrones, and for last season’s too, I guess, although if you pay any attention to GoT it isn’t really a spoiler, which is sort of the Point…)

(ALSO SPOILERS for Walking Dead and Mad Men, but at some point, come on, you know?)

(IMPORTANT NOTE: I promise this isn’t some Maureen Dowd-like piffle-paffle, where “Donald Trump may think he’s Tywin Lannister, but he’s really Lady Melisandre. I get paid millions for this. My brother’s writing tomorrow’s column!” It might not be any good, but it won’t be that.)

The last scene of last night’s Game of Thrones was the Red Lady attempting to resurrect Jon Snow, the erstwhile hero killed in last season’s finale, using what seemed to be the laziest spell ever (basically cutting his hair and saying, like, “hey, come back to life” in a magic language. It seemed really easy, honestly). At first, it seemed like failure, and Lady Melisandre and Snow’s allies left in despair. But then…panning over his prone body, a rush of air, a gasp, a convulsion, and an opening of eyes. Cut to black. What was dead is now alive.

Holy cow, right? That’s bonkers. Except that everybody watching the show knew it was coming. There was no way not to. From the moment Snow was killed last summer, all speculation has been on how he’s coming back to life, and when, not if. There were elaborate theories about his parentage and how that ties everything together, meaning he can’t be dead dead. There were people spotting him near the set. Kit Harrington’s haircut was parsed with a sort of Jesuitical ferocity for clues as to his role. Almost before the credits rolled on his death scene the internet was, collectively, sure he’d be back.

And so what could have been an interesting, if not mind-blowing scene, was only watched to see if the showrunners were going to make it interesting or if they were going to much it up. There was absolutely no suspense, and that is through no fault of their own. The writers and directors did as good a job as possible, I suppose, making us think he might be fully dead. But they knew that we knew he wasn’t going to be.

The creators of Cartoon Networks’ mind-bendingly brilliant Rick and Morty talked about this problem in an interview with the AVClub last year. As Dan Harmon put it:

I think that’s a really remarkable thing about today’s TV audience. You cannot write payoff-based TV anymore because the audience is essentially a render farm. They have an unlimited calculation capacity. There’s no writers’ room that can think more than 20 million people who can think about it for an hour a day.

Harmon was being complimentary, and said that for some shows it was a bonus, since they could focus mostly on jokes and characters, and the audience would fill in the plot. They’d even get credit for references they weren’t making. (“‘Was this a that reference?’ And I always want to answer them like: ‘Why, would that be cool?'”).

But for a drama, that can be a real problem. There is little room for surprises, especially in huge, world-building shows with legions of devoted fans. Smaller shows like Better Call Saul or Fargo can have interesting twists, but the only way for huge shows like GoT or The Walking Dead to do so is to jerk around the audience.

The way art is consumed has changed entirely. There has always been a weird relationship between creator and consumer, with an alchemic interplay, but in some ways the consumer has leapt in front of the creator. It’s not just mashups and remixes or whatever, but it is anticipation and analysis before creation. It’s putting people into corners, where they have to really stretch in order to surprise. That’s not always a bad thing, but it could be. In The Walking Dead, which was never really a well-written show anyway, the endless speculation about who Negan was going to kill meant that the only way to surprise was to not show who he did, and that didn’t turn out very well.

The artists behind TV shows, especially, have to create in anticipation of fan reaction in every corner, and have to deal with the hive mind that, as Harmon pointed out, collectively thinks about the show exponentially more than even its creators. No one really bought the “Don Draper is DB Cooper” theory, as fun as it was, because Matt Weiner wasn’t a “connect the dots” storyteller. But there was part of me that imagined that it was his plan, and then some jerk on the internet figured it out, and he had to change his vision to avoid being “scooped” in his own imagination.

This knowledge of what is going to happen reduces our capacity to be surprised, and really just heightens our innate lust of critique: we just want to see how well the story conforms to our expectations, and then rush to publicize our disapproval. Most of us I think do the same thing. My wife and I tend to talk more about if the showrunners are making the right choice or doing it well rather than if it was good or not, and if we don’t do so publically, our private conversations are no more generous to the spirit of artistic intention.

In a way, it’s the same thing with contested conventions. This feedback loop moves so quickly that, even in a contested convention, which we haven’t seen since 1976, every move is essentially choreographed in advance. We know which delegates are in play, and which ones aren’t Legions of pundits and people who actually know what they’re talking about have mapped out every scenario in advance. We know what parliamentary tricks Ted Cruz might try to use. The only drama comes in if he can do it well enough to work. But there won’t be any real surprises.

This, as much as anything, explains why the media and the public (and me) can’t stop talking about Trump. There isn’t a strategy or a plan. It’s terrifying, and that mentality would make for a horrible President (just as his instincts and personality would as well). But there is a certain thrill in not having any idea what will happen. We just know it will be monstrous and revolting and probably dangerous. But for many, that barely matters. Trump is the only unpredictable phenomenon out there. (Bernie is different, because while it isn’t totally predictable, he is sticking to the rebel script, to the detriment of his campaign and possibly his putative party. But more on that later).

I’m not saying that our knowing about Jon Snow’s resurrection is why Trump is winning. There are a lot of reasons, each one worse than the last. But a huge factor in his ascendancy has been the breathless attention being paid from the beginning. Much of this was valid; especially as his candidacy grew, it needed to be exposed as the dangerous sham it still is. But the reason for so much of the coverage is because it was wholly unpredictable, and in its own way, a true artistic enterprise. Not a good one; it’s a sick parody of Weimar porn, a clanging dissonant soundscape that reduced bowels to mush and drove people into mad syphilitic fits. But it was original, and for many, that’s all that matters.

 

03.30.16
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Trump on Abortion and Language: The Media Still Treats Him Like A Real Person

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I mean, just look at this guy, will you? Image from MSNBC.

OK, so Donald Trump is going to be doing another townhall-style thing with Chris Matthews tonight, which means two things: 1) you are going to be hearing a lot about “my old boss Tip O’Neil (the over/under on mentions by Matthews is 987), and 2) you’re going to be hearing a lot of nonsense which is mistaken for “telling it like it is.” This isn’t deep prognostication; everything said during the show has already been dissected by the media. The real clambake is when Trump stumbled onto abortion, a topic about which he is as ignorant as anything else.

He basically managed to be both cruel and politically stupid, which are rarely the same thing for the GOP. On the one hand, he basically admitted that women would have to be punished if they sought an abortion when it was banned, which is correct, of course. That’s the hideously logical conclusion to making something illegal, although it’s something the GOP doesn’t like to admit. But more than that- and Charles Pierce thinks this is the big one– in doing so, he reminded us all that when you make safe abortions difficult or impossible to obtain, people will get unsafe ones.

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03.24.16
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What Trump’s Particular Brand Of Lying Reveals

All politicians lie. That’s not a statement of cynicism; it’s part of the job. At some point, you have to hedge what you are really thinking, or what you really believe, because winning an election means appealing to the most citizens you possibly can. We’ve had spectacularly successful Presidents who have had an uneasy relationship with the truth. Lyndon Johnson and Nixon were both world-class liars. That’s not a positive thing, of course, but it is to say that Donald Trump being clinically dishonest does not, in and of itself, disqualify him from the Presidency. But it is his method of dishonesty, the kinds of lies he tells, and what that reveals not just about him, but how he’d run the country, that is something we’ve never seen. It is as dangerous as his rampant xenophobia, his bitter misogyny, and his huckster’s ability to appeal to the darkest heart of America.

Trump’s lies are possibly unlike anything we’ve ever seen, not just because of what they say, but because of what it says about him, and the reaction that his campaign has to it. His lies automatically become not just truth, but axiomatic and inevitable. What’s stranger, they become policy. This is the result of a man who has been surrounded by a fawning payroll for his entire life, cosseted by servants and sycophants. His whims become reality, and if reality disagrees, it can go pound sand. This is who he surrounds himself with, and it would continue into the White House. A few examples here will suffice.

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03.03.16
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Why Trump Is The Worst

 

Donald Trump

This guy.

 

I swear to kate, this blog was not supposed to be entirely about the election, and certainly not all about Trump, but as this nightmare becomes a reality, it is hard to avoid. It’s obvious to most of the country that Donald Trump is the worst, but it is still important, I think, to point out exactly why.

I know this sounds like apocryphal Pauline Kael, but I have yet to talk to a single human who isn’t disgusted by what’s happening, and who doesn’t feel fairly sick thinking about candidate Trump, or god help us, President Trump.  (They are obviously out there, of course. And there are a lot of them. They are the angry revenant of the original American character, one that predated and outlived the Revolution.) But what about it is exactly so sickening? I think it can be broken down into two main groups.

  • His platform, such as it is, which combines three horrifying planks in a way that is essentially unique in both American history and in the current world.
  • The fact that it is Donald goddamn Trump.

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03.02.16
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Super Tuesday: The Night The Myth Of Movement Conservativism Died

It’s a little after 6:00, Central Time, and the earliest polls in this strange Super Tuesday are beginning to come in. Some places are already calling Georgia for Donald Trump. This is not surprising, but is a state which some said held out hope for young Marco Rubio, the marshmallow savior for voters who think George W Bush was too intellectually engaged.

Today is also known as the SEC Primary, taking place as it does largely in the south. SEC is a nice modern way to put it, how we paint the New South, still idiosyncratic, but tucked away into the warm belt of the corporate/media nexus. It would be impolite though to call this what it really is: the Confederacy Primary. More than any other year since at least 1972, however, the Confederacy is dominating our politics, in the bizarre avatar of a know-nothing billionaire demagogue from New York. It’s a Southern kind of day in a Southern kind of year, and it exposes, for once and for all, the myth of the conservative movement, revealing what it always has been: a vehicle for atavistic rage, well-armed ignorance, xenophobia, and most prominently, white nationalism. There’s a straight line between William Buckley and Donald Trump, and the media’s inability or unwillingness to recognize it has led us to this calamity.

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01.28.16
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Last Chance: CNN And The Trump Debate Decision

By and large, I agree with Slate’s Jim Newell about Donald Trump’s decision to skip the debate. I don’t actually see it impacting the polls too much. People who have decided “Yeah, I really think that Donald Trump should be the President of the United States” have different ideas about qualifications than you and I, and sticking it that stuck-up blond will, at worst, do little to shake their resolve. The only question is if this vocal and poll-driven support translates into action, to votes and to caucusing. So if he ends up winning Iowa this will look like a masterstroke of political will, and if he loses he’ll look like a dope, but they will be ex-post facto narratives.

empty-debate-podiums

To me, the important thing is that Trump invited the other networks to stream his “counter-programming”, a nauseatingly insincere “fundraiser for wounded veterans”, which attempts to give a patina of respectability to his petulance. It seems likely that his act can get higher ratings than the debate, if just because people will want to see how much he attacks Fox and Megyn Kelley, because people are attracted to his style(which is bizarre: his shtick sounds exactly like a peculiarly dimwitted third grader who just learned how to swear).

It’s CNN, and MSNBC, and any of the business spinoffs, that interest me, if they decide to show it. Let’s stipulate a few things.

  1. No one really thinks of CNN as journalism anymore. They do some good work, and their reach is impressive, especially during breaking news, but it is buried under speculative and sensationalistic fluff.
  2. The Republican debates have been seal-barking absurdities, completely disconnected from reality, and highlighted by the two young Hispanic hopes arguing about how the other one doesn’t hate Mexicans enough.
  3. Tonight’s debate won’t change that.

And yet, it seems to me to be important that nobody cover Trump’s event. In doing so, the networks will abdicate any pretense they have about politics being something that matters, something that impacts people’s lives. As bad as the debates are, they are necessary for people to get a glimpse at the candidates, how they are when taken off guard, their personalities, their strengths, and especially their weaknesses. Debates are usually scripted and easily veer into sideshow, but are still an important part of the process.

To say that “Trump is rewriting the rules!” is true, but it is impossible to argue for the better. Sending cameras to this self-serving egoshow only further undermines the disconnect between POLITICS! as a show and the real politics that can make lives better or worse for the hundreds of millions who aren’t on TV and in the club. It is saying that the only thing which matters is the spectacle, the human torso imping his knife-mouthed way across the screen.

Ratings are important, and advertising dollars keep the lights on. Sticking it to Fox would be fun for CNN and MSNBC, and it is always fun to see Fox get swallowed by the beast it created. At some point though, a decision has to be made on whether the commitment to democracy means something, and as over-the-top as this sounds, gleefully ignoring even the most surface-level demonstration of the electoral process so that a megalomaniacal billionaire can do his witless routine demonstrates that commitment means nothing.