Tag Archives: Trump

An Accurate Description

I have previously cited observations and analyses from David French, a genuine conservative with whom I often agree. (Tomorrow, I will post about a significant disagreement with him, so it isn’t all sweetness and light.) French recently published a very perceptive essay in the New York Times, considering the worst possibilities of a second Trump term in office.

French began by recognizing that a second term wouldn’t be characterized by the internal divisions of the first, which saw an effort by responsible aides and appointees to contain Trump’s worst impulses. He recognized that, in a second term, there would be sufficient numbers of “pure Trump sycophants” to completely staff the White House–and “his MAGA base would replace the Federalist Society as the screener of his judicial appointments.” But he has an even more ominous fear.

I dread the division and conflict of a second Trump term, and I don’t minimize the possibility of Trump doing permanent political damage to the Republic. But the problem I’m most concerned about isn’t the political melee; it’s the ongoing cultural transformation of red America, a transformation that a second Trump term could well render unstoppable.

To put the matter as simply as possible: Eight years of bitter experience have taught us that supporting Trump degrades the character of his core supporters. There are still millions of reluctant Trump voters, people who’ve retained their kindness, integrity and good sense even as they cast a ballot for the past and almost certainly future G.O.P. nominee. I have friends and family members who vote for Trump, and I love them dearly. But the most enduring legacy of a second Trump term could well be the conviction on the part of millions of Americans that Trumpism isn’t just a temporary political expediency, but the model for Republican political success and — still worse — the way that God wants Christian believers to practice politics.

I will inject here my assumption that French’s own (genuine) Christianity is what has allowed him to continue dearly loving those in his family who support Donald Trump. Not being a Christian of any sort–and being blessed with a family utterly devoid of Trumpers–I will admit that I can conceive of no way I could continue to respect a family member who failed to see Donald Trump for the ignorant, self-absorbed and increasingly mentally-ill specimen he is. And in the absence of respect, love comes hard…

As French writes, he has never before seen extremism penetrate a vast American community so deeply, so completely and so comprehensively.

As the Iowa caucuses approached, Trump escalated his language, going so far as to call his political opponents “vermin” and declaring that immigrants entering America illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The statement was so indefensible and repugnant that many expected it to hurt Trump. Yet a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll found that a 42 percent plurality of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers said the statement would make them more likely to support Trump — a substantially greater percentage than the 28 percent who said it would make them less likely to support him.

French notes with alarm that  numerous “Christian” Republicans believe Donald Trump is God’s chosen man to save America. Trump himself shared a video modeled on Paul Harvey’s famous video “So God Made a Farmer,” that proclaims “God Made Trump.” The result–as French quite accurately notes–is “a religious movement steeped in fanaticism but stripped of virtue.”

Absent public virtue, a republic can fall. And a Trump win in 2024 would absolutely convince countless Americans that virtue is for suckers, and vice is the key to victory. If Trump loses a second time, there is a chance he’ll end up a painful aberration in American politics, a depressing footnote in our national story. But if he wins again, the equation will change and history may record that he was not the culmination of a short-lived reactionary moment, but rather the harbinger of a greater darkness to come.

I’ve quoted liberally from French’s essay, because I think he is absolutely correct–he has identified the (terrifying) stakes of this year’s election, and the consequences of victories for Trump and the MAGA Republicans who idolize and emulate him. (Here in Indiana, that most definitely includes mini-Trumpers Braun and Banks.)

Sociologists, psychologists and political scientists have a variety of theories about why people embrace fascism. We’re still exploring the reasons so many “good Germans” refused to see the writing on those walls.

Whatever the reason, the rest of us absolutely cannot allow America to enter that “greater darkness.” Polls may show a majority of Republicans have lost their way, but a majority of Americans have not. That majority needs to vote.

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An Interesting Analogy

A reader recently sent me a New York Times subscriber newsletter by Nate Cohn that drew an analogy between the upcoming Presidential race and the election in 1948. Most of us remember that election–if we remember it at all–for the iconic picture of a victorious President Truman holding up a newspaper with the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

Cohn goes through a number of ways in which the run-up to that election is strikingly similar to the run-up to this November. For example, voters were sour about the economy, despite the fact that it was doing well–his subtitle was “Americans were angry with Truman because of high prices in the aftermath of World War II, even as other economic signals looked promising.”

If there’s a time that might make sense of today’s political moment, postwar America might just be it. Many analysts today have been perplexed by public dissatisfaction with the economy, as unemployment and gross domestic product have remained strong and as inflation has slowed significantly after a steep rise. To some, public opinion and economic reality are so discordant that it requires a noneconomic explanation, sometimes called “vibes,” like the effect of social media or a pandemic hangover on the national mood.

But in the era of modern economic data, Harry Truman was the only president besides Joe Biden to oversee an economy with inflation over 7 percent while unemployment stayed under 4 percent and G.D.P. growth kept climbing. Voters weren’t overjoyed then, either. Instead, they saw Mr. Truman as incompetent, feared another depression and doubted their economic future, even though they were at the dawn of postwar economic prosperity.

As Cohn notes, the parallels are striking, although today, inflation followed a pandemic rather than a war. But there was a great housing crisis caused by excess demand, as troops returned from overseas, not unlike the shortage of affordable housing that we are facing today. It was also a time of labor unrest–an unrest we are also experiencing. As Cohn reports,”The most severe inflation of the last 100 years wasn’t in the 1970s, but in 1947, reaching around 20 percent.”

Mr. Truman’s popularity collapsed. By spring in 1948, an election year, his approval rating had fallen to 36 percent, down from over 90 percent at the end of World War II. He fell behind the Republican Thomas Dewey in the early head-to-head polling. He was seen as in over his head. The New Republic ran a front-page editorial titled: “As a candidate for president, Harry Truman should quit.”

We’ve been hearing that refrain recently, as well.

In retrospect, it’s hard to believe voters were so frustrated. Historians generally now consider Mr. Truman one of the great presidents, and the postwar period was the beginning of the greatest economic boom in American history. By any conceivable measure, Americans were unimaginably better off than during the Great Depression a decade earlier. Unemployment remained low by any standard, and consumers kept spending. The sales of seemingly every item — appliances, cars and so on — were an order of magnitude higher than before the war.

Truman’s decision to desegregate the armed forces wasn’t exactly met with applause, either.

Again, the similarities are stunning. The essay proceeds to report the results of that year’s polling on a variety of issues, and calling the results “grim” would be a massive understatement. But Harry Truman won, and Cohn goes into considerable detail about the themes of his campaign, and why he eked out a victory.

What Cohn doesn’t address is the single biggest difference between Truman versus Dewey and the likely upcoming contest between Biden and Trump.

The 1948 campaign was waged between a successful but undervalued President and a legitimate and sane contender; the upcoming election will pit a successful and undervalued President against an ignorant, narcissistic, mentally-ill cult leader who is poses an existential threat to the Constitution, democracy and the rule of law.

Thomas Dewey was a traditional candidate with a respectable and relevant resume. He understood government, having served as Governor of New York. There was no reason to fear that his occupancy of the Oval Office would bring about chaos, introduce fascism and/or destroy the Republic. (And after the votes were counted, he didn’t claim he’d “really” won…)

Cohn’s analysis is excellent as far as it goes. What it fails to highlight is what we all know: the biggest asset Joe Biden has in the upcoming election is Donald Trump. I agree with the reported sentiment of a participant in a focus group (of Republicans!): If the contest is between Trump and Joe Biden,  I’ll vote for Biden even if he’s in a coma.

Today is Martin Luther King day. Every vote for Donald Trump is a vote to reject King’s dream.

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When People Tell You Who They Are…

Let me begin a very distressing post by affirming my belief that there are still some Republicans who are good people, although their percentage is clearly dwindling. (Why good people remain Republican is something I have trouble understanding, but that’s a different issue.)

What has become very clear, however, is the descent of what was once a traditional right-of-center political party into a rabid, hateful, and thoroughly unAmerican cult. That descent is playing out right now in Iowa.

Permit Jake Tapper to share the evidence.

CNN anchor Jake Tapper was stunned by a poll published this month showing former President Donald Trump’s Nazi-echoing speeches about “poisoning the blood” and eliminating “vermin” from the U.S. overwhelmingly help him with Republicans in Iowa.

Trump is under fire once again — including from Tapper — after he delivered another Hitler-echoing rant at a rally in Durham, New Hampshire, on Saturday in which he accused several groups of non-White immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”

But newly-released results from an NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll — taken December 2-7, before the most recent speech — show those Hitler-esque speeches help him with Iowa GOP voters by nearly two-to-one.

The Des Moines Register polled Iowa voters, asking those it identified as likely Republican caucus-goers for their opinions about a candidate who said that immigrants “poison the blood of America.” Forty-two percent of Iowa Republicans said it would make them more likely to support that candidate. Only twenty-eight percent said it would make them less likely, and the remaining twenty-nice percent indicated that it would not matter to them.

So–forty-two percent of Iowa Republicans agreed with a message lifted verbatim from Hitler, and another twenty-nine percent did not find the message troubling, let alone disqualifying. Seventy-one percent of the Republican respondents either endorsed that vile message or were untroubled by it.

As one of the panel members on Tapper’s show put it,

Republican or Democrat, anybody who spent time in Iowa around the caucus knows the term Iowa nice. Iowa voters are the nicest people in the world. But what we’ve seen in the Trump era is that part of the Republican base is not so nice. And another part of the base, so you combine these two, anything that Donald Trump says they’ll just say, yes, give me more of that, whether they think about it or not. And what troubles me isn’t just the language that Trump uses, but if he’s using it and then wins, what is he going to do within that rhetoric?

What are the actions that follow the rhetoric? And that’s what gets us to a very, very un-American place.

Political scientists and pundits have traced the “sorting” of Americans into various categories: fundamentalists versus more mainstream religious folks, religious versus secular, urban versus rural, educated versus not, blue versus red…Perhaps a more relevant set of categories would be humane versus execrable.

What sorts of people think it is perfectly appropriate to refer to other human beings as “vermin”? What kind of person looks at would-be immigrants–often people enduring dangerous travels and trusting treacherous companions in an effort to flee intolerable situations so they can give their children a chance for a better life–and sees someone “poisoning the blood” of the “real Americans” whose ancestors, more often than not, made similar treks.

For that matter, what sort of  performative “Christian” posts a lengthy rant purported to be his  “Christmas message” focusing on “Crooked Joe Biden,” “Deranged Jack Smith,” and those who are “looking to destroy our once great USA” and ending with “MAY THEY ROT IN HELL.” (Caps in original.)

And a Merry Christmas to you, too.

Reasonable people of good will can disagree about immigration law. They can draw different conclusions about how to handle the mess at the nation’s southern border. People of good will can debate the optimum number of people to be admitted to this country, and the proper bases for admitting them or turning them away.

But Republicans who agree that these desperate people are “vermin,” who think it is appropriate to accuse them of “poisoning the blood of Americans” are most definitely not people of good will. They are the raw material from which Storm Troopers are fashioned.

A week or so ago, a reader reminded me that it was Maya Angelou who counseled “when someone tells you who they are, believe them.”

The GOP is telling us who they are, and what that once “Grand Old Party” has become. Believe them.

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Why We Need To Be Careful With Language

One of the features of contemporary discourse that drives me wild (granted, it’s pretty easy to set me off) is the use of language to label and insult, rather than communicate. For pontificators on the Right,  every social program is socialism (and their view of socialism is indistinguishable from “godless communism”). On the left, the “F” word–fascism– gets tossed about with a similar lack of communicative precision.

The problem with indiscriminate labeling, of course, is that when the real thing comes along, the terminology has lost its proper effect.

Tom Nichols has recently examined that phenomenon in an essay for the Atlantic.

When I was a college professor teaching political science and international relations, I tried to make my students think very hard about using words such as war and terrorism, which we often apply for their emotional impact without much thought—the “war” on poverty, the “war” on drugs, and, in a trifecta after 9/11, the “war on terrorism.”

And so, I dug in my heels when Donald Trump’s critics described him and his followers as fascists. Authoritarians? Yes, some. Illiberal? Definitely. But fascism, a term coined by Benito Mussolini and now commonly used to describe Italy, Germany, and other nations in the 1930s, has a distinct meaning, and denotes a form of government that is beyond undemocratic.

Fascism is not mere oppression. It is a more holistic ideology that elevates the state over the individual (except for a sole leader, around whom there is a cult of personality), glorifies hypernationalism and racism, worships military power, hates liberal democracy, and wallows in nostalgia and historical grievances. It asserts that all public activity should serve the regime, and that all power must be gathered in the fist of the leader and exercised only by his party.

Nichols reviewed Trump’s political emergence, and explained why he was an “obnoxious and racist gadfly” but still a long way from fascism. Nichol’s points out that Trump lacked any political program–really, any consistency beyond his exhausting narcissism.

Trump had long wanted to be somebody in politics, but he is also rather indolent—again, not a characteristic of previous fascists—and he did not necessarily want to be saddled with any actual responsibilities. According to some reports, he never expected to win in 2016. But even then, in the run-up to the election, Trump’s opponents were already calling him a fascist. I counseled against such usage at the time, because Trump, as a person and as a public figure, is just so obviously ridiculous; fascists, by contrast, are dangerously serious people, and in many circumstances, their leaders have been unnervingly tough and courageous. Trump—whiny, childish, unmanly—hardly fits that bill. (A rare benefit of his disordered character is that his defensiveness and pettiness likely continue to limit the size of his personality cult.)

Nichols had continued to warn against what he called “indiscriminate use” of the term fascism– because he worried that the day might come when it would be accurate, and he wanted to preserve its power to shock and alarm.

That day has come.

Nichols points to Trump’s recent speeches–incoherent as usual, but now liberally sprinkled with terminology favored by Hitler and Mussolini, words like vermin and expressions like poisoning the blood of our country. He then enumerates the truly horrifying programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office.

Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans.

Unfortunately, the overuse of fascist (among other charges) quickly wore out the part of the public’s eardrums that could process such words. Trump seized on this strategic error by his opponents and used it as a kind of political cover. Over the years, he has become more extreme and more dangerous, and now he waves away any additional criticism as indistinguishable from the over-the-top objections he faced when he entered politics, in 2015.

Precision in language matters. We’ve seen how the Right’s longtime practice of calling every government program “socialism” has eroded the negative connotations of that term. Nichols is correct in observing that overuse of the term fascist has dangerously dulled recognition of what that term actually means.

The contest between an aspiring fascist and a coalition of prodemocracy forces is even clearer now. But deploy the word fascist with care; many of our fellow Americans, despite their morally abysmal choice to support Trump, are not fascists.

As for Trump, he has abandoned any democratic pretenses, and lost any benefit of the doubt about who and what he is.

Indeed he has.

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The Banality Of Crazy

Thomas Edsell recently had a guest essay in the New York Times that addressed a question I’ve had for a long time. Why don’t media figures state the obvious? Donald Trump is mentally ill. Crazy.

Edsell quoted political scientist Brian Klaas, whose Oct. 1 essay was titled, “The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity.”

Klaas argued that the presidential contest now pits a 77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to power against “an 80-year-old with mainstream Democratic Party views who sometimes misspeaks or trips.”

“One of those two candidates,” Klaas noted, “faces relentless newspaper columns and TV pundit ‘takes’ arguing that he should drop out of the race. (Spoiler alert: It’s somehow not the racist authoritarian sexual abuse fraudster facing 91 felony charges.)”

Klass points to the multiple pundits telling Biden to drop out, or engaging in “doom and gloom” predictions about Biden’s age. Meanwhile, the response to Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior is, as he says, “crickets.”

How is it possible that it’s not front page news when a man who soon may return to power calls for law enforcement to kill people for minor crimes? And why do so few people question Trump’s mental acuity rather than Biden’s, when Trump proposes delusional, unhinged plans for forest management and warns his supporters that Biden is going to lead us into World War II (which would require a time machine), or wrongly claims that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016?

Klaas thinks that media outlets have succumbed to what he called the “banality of crazy.” That has led them to ignore

even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world — precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.

Klass argues that the “don’t amplify him” strategy is nothing short of disastrous–and I agree.

Edsell reminds his readers that, three months after Trump took office, the Yale School of Medicine convened a conference called A Duty to Warn. Conference attendees issued a book titled  “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.”

I read that book; it was recommended by a psychiatrist friend. It had chapters with titles like “Our Witness to Malignant Normality,” “Unbridled and Extreme Hedonism: How the Leader of the Free World Has Proven Time and Again That He Is Unfit for Duty,” and “Pathological Narcissism and Politics: a Lethal Combination.”

I understand that a given individual can be deeply mentally ill. What I simply do not understand is how people can look at Donald J. Trump and fail to see a cognitively impaired, unstable and delusional individual who is getting worse as he ages.

Trump has pledged to shoot shoplifters (“We will immediately stop all the pillaging and theft. Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”), pledged to “root out” the “communists, Marxist fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”)

On Nov. 6, Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett reported in The Washington Post that Trump “wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff John F. Kelly and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley.”

Edsell includes quotes from several psychiatrists who attribute the spiraling of his insanity to age (he’s only 4 years younger than Biden) and the stress of his multiplying legal problems.

Most of the specialists I contacted see Trump’s recent behavior and public comments as part of an evolving process.

“Trump is an aging malignant narcissist,” Aaron L. Pincus, a professor of psychology at Penn State, wrote in an email. “As he ages, he appears to be losing impulse control and is slipping cognitively. So we are seeing a more unfiltered version of his pathology. Quite dangerous.”

In addition, Pincus continued, “Trump seems increasingly paranoid, which can also be a reflection of his aging brain and mental decline.”

Edsall and Klass are right: the media needs to call crazy, crazy.

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