Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Can We Define “Great”?

One of the consequences of the fragmented media environment fostered by the Internet has been the development of alternate realities. Americans increasingly get our “news” from sources carefully chosen to confirm our pre-existing biases.

Nowhere is this more apparent than with the divisions over Donald Trump and his slogan  “Make America Great Again.”

It’s true, as many historians have pointed out, that the people with whom this slogan resonates tend to have a somewhat selective understanding of America’s history–one that omits the nation’s frequent deviation from its cherished principles. But inaccurate/incomplete history isn’t really the problem. The problem is with their definition of “greatness,” which tends to correspond with straight white male Christian dominance.

My own bias is for the vision of American greatness described by soccer star Megan Rapinoe in a recent article in the Guardian.

The US women’s soccer co-captain Megan Rapinoe has delivered an uncompromising message to Donald Trump, amid ongoing controversy over a possible visit to the White House by the World Cup champions.

Asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper what she would like to say to the American leader, Rapinoe said: “Your message is excluding people. You’re excluding me, you’re excluding people that look like me, you’re excluding people of colour, you’re excluding Americans that maybe support you.”

Rapinoe has been outspoken about LGBT rights as well as racial and gender equality. After the US won the World Cup for a record fourth time on Sunday, Rapinoe called for progress on equal pay for the male and female teams.

In a previous interview with CNN, Rapinoe had said that, should the U.S. team win, they would not go to the “fucking” White House. In the Guardian, she expressed regret for her language, but not for her sentiment.

“I would not go, and every teammate that I’ve talked to explicitly about it would not go,” she said.

“I don’t think anyone on the team has any interest in lending the platform that we’ve worked so hard to build, and the things that we fight for, and the way that we live our life … I don’t think that we want that to be co-opted or corrupted by this administration,” Rapinoe told Cooper.

She added that allowing the White House to “put us on display” didn’t “make sense for us at all”, adding: “There are so many other people that I would rather talk to and have meaningful conversations that could really affect change in Washington than going to the White House.”

The sports star added the US needed to have a “reckoning” with the implications of Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan. “You’re harking back to an era that was not great for everyone – it might have been great for a few people, and maybe America is great for a few people right now, but it’s not great for enough Americans in this world.”

Rapinoe’s definition of greatness–a definition with which I concur–is inclusion.

 A great society is one that values all its citizens, a society that rewards people based upon their behavior rather than their identity–a society that encourages and celebrates everyone’s participation and contribution.

Unfortunately, a  growing segment of the Internet is fostering a fear of “replacement” in insecure whites.That fear is based upon a definition of “greatness” that frantically opposes inclusion; “greatness” is a country where “people who look like me” are in control. As the linked article reports,

The far right has set off a vicious circle of disinformation by filling the information and communication gap on topics such as demographic change with emotive, speculative and hysterical content instead of facts.

The next election will be a choice between those who define American greatness as inclusion and civic equality and those who believe that “great” means an America that privileges straight white Christians.

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What Does “Conservative” Mean Now?

This is a test. Who said this?

We lead the world because unique among nations, we draw our people, our strength, from every country and every corner of the world … Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge; always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever close the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost … And that’s why the Statue of Liberty lifts her lamp to welcome them to the golden door. It is bold men and women, yearning for freedom and opportunity, who leave their homelands and come to a new country to start their lives over. They believe in the American dream. And over and over, they make it come true for themselves, for their children, and for others. They give more than they receive. They labor and succeed, and often they are entrepreneurs. But their greatest contribution is more than economic, because they understand in a special way how glorious it is to be an American. They renew our pride and gratitude in the United States of America, the greatest, freest nation in the world. The last, best hope of man on Earth.

The answer, it may surprise you to learn, is Ronald Reagan. It was from his final speech as President.

I didn’t know that, but it was only one revelation among many in a paper delivered at a conference I attended on American Political History–a paper by Marcus Witcher that traced the “conservatism” of Donald Trump back to that of Pat Buchanan, and drew a strong distinction between what he dubbed Buchanan’s “paleoconservatism” and the more optimistic and libertarian approach of Reagan.

Trump, it appears, did not come out of nowhere, much as we might wish to believe that. There has long been a “Trumpian” faction in the GOP.

As I read the paper, which the author was kind enough to share, I was struck by the numerous parallels between Buchanan and Trump:  the culture war rhetoric; the need to “save” America from “barbarians”–feminists, homosexuals, immigrants and foreigners; opposition to free trade and NAFTA; opposition to immigration, both legal and illegal.

And of course, the appeal to bigotry.

Some of us remember the very different speeches made by Buchanan and Reagan at the 1992 GOP convention. Buchanan’s speech (which Molly Ivins memorably quipped “sounded better in the original German”) was all about culture war and protecting the “Judeo-Christian heritage” of America; Reagan’s was about “working together for a brighter tomorrow.” Reagan concluded his speech by saying that, whatever history ultimately concluded about him and his Presidency, “I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts.”

Not a Trumpian sentiment.

We can agree or disagree with Reagan’s policies, but there is no disputing the vast difference between his version of conservatism and the much darker version peddled by Pat Buchanan.

Buchanan eventually left the GOP for the Reform Party, and he defeated Donald Trump for that party’s nomination in 2000. (If I ever knew that, I’d forgotten it.)  Trump left the Reform party after that defeat, but as the paper pointed out, the 2016 messaging that won Trump  the GOP nomination is an eerie, virtually identical replica of Buchanan’s Reform Party message in 2000. Even the slogan “America First” was Buchanan’s. Politico later concluded that Buchanan’s legacy “was being Trump before Trump was Trump.”

For good or ill, the GOP is no longer the party of Ronald Reagan. (Nor is it the party of Barry Goldwater, or Nelson Rockerfeller, or Dwight Eisenhower, or ….) Reagan’s children have been vocal about the differences between the Gipper and Trump; they insist their father would be horrified by Trump and by what the current GOP has become.

Unfortunately, with its full-throated endorsement of Trump and Trumpism, the GOP is now   the party of Pat Buchanan–bitter, hateful and backward.

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Twisted And Hateful

I often quote Ed Brayton, who follows crackpots and lunatics on the far fringes of the Religious Right and reports on their activities in his blog, Dispatches from the Culture Wars.  (I honestly don’t know how he manages to keep both his sanity and his sense of humor after daily encounters with these deeply disturbed individuals, but  he has–I’ve met him and he’s very smart, very astute–and very funny.)

Just a few days ago, Ed revisited Randall Terry.

Anyone familiar with the effort to deny women our reproductive rights has encountered news of Terry at some point. He founded Operation Rescue, the group that blocked clinic entrances around the country and engaged in other semi-terrorist “pro life” activities. (Give him props for honesty, though–he admits what so many of his fellow “pro life” warriors pretend is untrue– he’s as opposed to birth control as he is to abortion. Keep those women barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen like God intended!)

Not surprisingly, he’s also homophobic, and he’s recently fixated on Mayor Pete. As Ed writes,

Mayor Pete Buttigieg is polling well in Iowa and raising lots of money in the Democratic primary for president and now he’s going to be hounded by anti-choice crackpot Randall Terry. He’s headed to Iowa to confront Butegieg for being a babykiller who is locked in the sexual bondage of homosexuality. Or something.

Ed shared Randall Terry’s press release:

We are going to Iowa to confront the “new political sensation;” Pete Buttigieg.

We’ve sent a press release to every daily newspaper in the state of Iowa…telling them we are coming to welcome “Mayor Pete” AT ALL FIVE of his campaign stops next week!

As I read and read about this 37 year old, poor lost soul, I am filled with grief and rage.

I grieve for Pete Buttigieg – for his endangered soul, his sexual bondage – and I am enraged by what he is really doing.

He is a baby-killing politician, who is recruiting young people into homosexual bondage by his example, and trying to normalize what is an intrinsically evil behavior.

This rant reminds me of the greeting cards I got one Easter when I was Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU; there were a couple dozen of them, all with a praying Virgin Mary on the front. The inside of the cards was blank, and on each one, someone had written  “We are praying for your sinful soul.”

Unfortunately, I still have my old, sinful soul. And from all accounts, Mayor Pete is still gay and still running for President.

People like Terry would be funny if they weren’t dangerous. Most simply pose a threat to religious liberty and the Constitution, which is troubling enough, but others are violent. All of them are locked in to an alternate reality.

And speaking of alternate realities, Ed also had a post about crazy lady Michelle Bachmann.

Michele Bachmann, the “pastor to the United Nations,” told crackpot Jan Markell that she had never seen a more Biblical president than Donald Trump and that she prays that God will help destroy the “deep state” so that Trump can “expose the hidden deeds of darkness” done by that amorphous, universal bunch of baddies.

If only the “deep state” of rightwing fever dreams really did exist and could do something about Trump…

How detached from reality do you have to be to consider Donald Trump “Biblical”?

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The Inmates Running The Asylum

There really is no end to this. Every day, we are reminded that everyone in or around the White House is either a White Supremicist (like creepy Steven Miller) or a nutcase invested in conspiracy theories. Of course, the two categories are not mutually exclusive.

Case in point.

The wife of White House communications director Bill Shine went on an anti-vaccine tirade while spreading conspiracy theories about an outbreak of measles in the Pacific north-west.

In a series of tweets, Darla Shine lashed out against a CNN segment detailing the outbreak, which has seen more than 50 unvaccinated people contract measles in Washington state and Oregon.

“Here we go LOL #measlesoutbreak on #CNN #Fake #Hysteria,” Darla Shine tweeted. “The entire Baby Boom population alive today had the #Measles as kids. Bring back our #ChildhoodDiseases they keep you healthy & fight cancer.”

“I had the #Measles #Mumps #ChickenPox as a child and so did every kid I knew,” she went on to claim, adding: “Sadly my kids had #MMR so they will never have the life long natural immunity I have. Come breathe on me!”

Shine is a former TV producer. She’s married to Bill Shine, the former executive at–where else?– Fox News who is now Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for communications.

When she was criticized for her comments, Shine not only accused “the Left” of attempting to smear her, but suggested that measles can cure cancer (mischaracterizing a complex case from 2014 that did not reach that conclusion.)

This isn’t her first visit to whack-a-doodle land. She has “debunked” use of sunscreens and spread several conspiracy theories warning of the “dangers” of vaccines.

Other unearthed tweets found Darla Shine making profane remarks about race, questioning why white people were considered racist for using “the n’word” given its use by black people and defending the Confederate flag.

She has repeatedly struck a dismissive tone when discussing allegations of sexual assault, be it in the military or at Fox News.

Granted, this woman is the spouse of a White House staffer–not the staffer herself. (Her husband departed Fox News after he was found to have suppressed allegations of sexual impropriety against Roger Ailes and Bill O”Reilly.) Nevertheless, her looney-tunes tweets reflect upon the administration and are highly inappropriate.

Of course, so are Trump’s.

In fact, I can’t think of anyone who is still in the White House, from the President on down, who isn’t an embarrassment to humanity.

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Foxconn For Dummies

Remember all the hoopla about Scott Walker’s deal with Foxconn? As the New Yorker summarized it,

When it was signed, less than two years ago, the deal that Wisconsin struck with the electronics giant Foxconn contained all kinds of headline-grabbing numbers: the company promised a ten-billion-dollar investment in the state, a new 21.5-million-square-foot campus for manufacturing L.C.D. screens, and as many as thirteen thousand new jobs, paying an average wage of fifty-four thousand dollars a year. The manufacturing facility would be the Taiwan-based company’s first U.S. factory, and the prospect stirred the hopes of a region that still dreams of clawing back the middle-class factory jobs that were its pride in the middle of the twentieth century and that it lost to foreign competition long ago. As Dan Kaufman wrote for The New Yorker last year, the deal also appeared poised to give a boost to the reëlection prospects of Scott Walker, the conservative Republican who was then Wisconsin’s governor, who transformed the state into a bastion of conservative, free-market politics.

Scott Walker’s version of free markets differs rather considerably from mine; giving huge subsidies via tax abatements and other government goodies to large enterprises hardly equates to a competitive marketplace where manufacturers and sellers contend on equal terms with others.

Trump, of course, applauded the announcement as evidence that he–the self-described great dealmaker– was bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. (although from what I read, he had nothing to do with making the deal originally).

As the details of Walker’s great coup leaked out, and Wisconsin citizens found out what the state had promised, the coverage became considerably less rosy.

But since then Wisconsinites have found out a lot more about the $4.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies that Foxconn was promised—money the company was being given despite the dramatic cuts that the state has made, in recent years, to education, infrastructure, and other public spending—along with the pollution waivers and special legal privileges that it was granted and the bulldozing of neighborhoods that it needed to acquire the land it wanted.

Those details helped defeat Walker in the gubernatorial election. But the state was still on the hook for the promised subsidies.

To add insult to injury, the company recently–and significantly– backpedaled on its commitments, telling Reuters it isn’t even going to manufacture in Wisconsin, and will employ mainly research and development workers. As a result, some of the incentives the state originally promised will be left on the table, but others are irreversible. Millions of dollars of highway money have already been redirected to support Foxconn’s project, and a number of homeowners have been “cleared” from the area designated for the factory.

Time Magazine reported that, following a telephone call from Trump in the wake of the no-manufacturing announcement, the company said it would build a smaller factory after all.

I wonder what Trump promised them.

The Foxcomm scandal is just a particularly egregious example of corporate welfare; bribery ( subsidies and an absence of regulation) has become a commonplace element of what is delicately called “economic development.”

This clusterf**k is simply added evidence that America’s economic system is corporatism, not market capitalism. The dictionary defines corporatism as the control of a state or organization by large interest groups, and adds that “fascism was the high point of corporatism.”

Real capitalists are screwed.

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