Tag Archives: Trump

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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R.I.P. GOP….

I often disagree with Bret Stephens of the New York Times on the issues, but I appreciate his intellectual honesty. Stephens is a genuine political conservative, appalled by Donald Trump and clear-eyed about the transformation of the GOP from a center-right political party into an unrecognizable cult held together by grievance.

As he observed in a recent exchange with liberal columnist Gail Collins:

If there were truth in advertising, Republicans would have to rename themselves the Opposite Party. They were the party of law and order. Now they want to abolish the F.B.I. They were the party that revered the symbols of the nation. Now they think the Jan. 6 riots were like a “normal tourist visit.” They were the party of moral character and virtue. Now they couldn’t care less that their standard-bearer consorted with a porn star. They were the party of staring down the Evil Empire. Now they’re Putin’s last best hope. They were the party of free trade. Now they’re protectionists. They were the party that cheered the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which argued that corporations had free speech. Now they are being sued by Disney because the company dared express an opinion they dislike. They were the party that once believed that “family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande,” as George W. Bush put it. Now some of them want to invade Mexico.

The party that used to defend the right of businesses to run their own affairs–the party that, as Stephens notes, was committed to free trade– is relentlessly attacking corporations that have recognized the importance of diversity and inclusion, and is in the process of embracing tariffs–aka trade war tactics.

According to the Washington Post,  in a recent interview with Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow, Trump explained that he favors a universal 10% tariff on all goods imported into the US:

“I think we should have a ring around the collar” of the U.S. economy, Trump said in an interview with Kudlow on Fox Business on Thursday. “When companies come in and they dump their products in the United States, they should pay, automatically, let’s say a 10 percent tax … I do like the 10 percent for everybody.”

The Post reported that Trump and his advisers are promoting the imposition of a universal tariff on all imports as “a central plank in his 2024 bid for a second term.” 

As virtually all economists–conservative and/or liberal– will insist, tariffs are a terrible idea. (In his daily newsletter, Robert Hubbell characterized a 10% universal tariff as “an economy-destroying debacle of generational proportions.”) Hubbell quoted one expert  on the subject who characterized the idea as “lunacy.”

What is wrong with tariffs, you ask? Well, other than leading other major economic powers  to conclude the United States cannot be trusted as a trading partner, tariffs are basically a hidden tax ultimately paid by US consumers. Also, history confirms that the imposition of tariffs by one country inevitably triggers retaliatory tariffs by others.

We saw the effects of such tariffs when Trump imposed a number of them on China during his disastrous Presidency. They wreaked havoc on U.S. farmers. The impact was so severe that the administration had to make massive grants to farmers to offset the losses.

As  Forbes reported at the time, 

The Trump administration gave more taxpayer dollars to farmers harmed by the administration’s trade policies than the federal government spends each year building ships for the Navy or maintaining America’s nuclear arsenal, according to a new report. A National Foundation for American Policy analysis concluded the spending on farmers was also higher than the annual budgets of several government agencies. “The amount of money raises questions about the strategy of imposing tariffs and permitting the use of taxpayer money to shield policymakers from the consequences of their actions,” according to the analysis.

According to experts, the value of US imports in 2022 approached $4 trillion. A 10% universal tariff imposed on that amount would cost consumers $400 billion.

This insane tariff proposal is just one more bit of evidence–as if we needed any– that Trump hasn’t the foggiest idea how economies work. His behavior during the four years he was President convincingly demonstrated that he also lacks any understanding of how government operates. He may well be the most profoundly ignorant person ever to occupy the Oval Office (and we’ve had some clunkers…)

Given Stephens’ entirely accurate description of the “Opposite Party,” and given the loyalty of MAGA Republicans to a self-obsessed clown whose positions are, indeed, “opposite” of those traditionally held by the GOP, all I can conclude is that grievance–primarily racial grievance–has Trumped sanity. (Double-entendre intended..)

The GOP that once was is dead. R.I.P.

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How We Got Here

I hadn’t planned to post about Trump’s latest indictment–the media has been all over it, including his trip to turn himself in and the mugshot (which perfectly captures this demented and hateful man’s affect). But the day after that unprecedented event, two newsletters that I regularly receive–from Heather Cox Richardson and Robert Hubbell–when read together, told the story of how we got here and where we are.

Richardson, of course, is an acclaimed American historian–someone well equipped to trace the trajectory of the once-Grand Old Party from Lincoln to Trump. And that is what she did.

In the 1960s, Republicans made a devil’s bargain, courting the racists and social traditionalists who began to turn from the Democratic Party when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt began to make inroads on racial discrimination. Those same reactionaries jumped from the Democrats to create their own party when Democratic president Harry S. Truman strengthened his party’s turn toward civil rights by creating a presidential commission on civil rights in 1946 and then ordering the military to desegregate in 1948. Reactionaries rushed to abandon the Democrats permanently after Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, joining the Republicans at least temporarily to vote for Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who promised to roll back civil rights laws and court decisions.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act was the final straw for many of those reactionaries, and they began to move to the Republicans as a group when Richard Nixon promised not to use the federal government to enforce civil rights in the states. This so-called southern strategy pulled the Republican Party rightward.

In 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan appeared at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, a few miles from where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964 for their work registering Black Mississippians to vote, and said, “I believe in states’ rights.” Reagan tied government defense of civil rights to socialism, insisting that the government was using tax dollars from hardworking Americans to give handouts to lazy people, often using code words to mean “Black.”

Since then, as their economic policies have become more and more unpopular, the Republicans have kept voters behind them by insisting that anyone calling for federal action is advocating socialism and by drawing deep divisions between those who vote Republican, whom they define as true Americans, and anyone who does not vote Republican and thus, in their ideology, is anti-American.

The bottom line is the transformation of a once-responsible political party into a racist cult. I would actually quibble with one part of Richardson’s summary–the GOP’s policies haven’t “become unpopular,” they’ve vanished. It is impossible to identify “policies” espoused by the party’s current iteration–unless racism, misogyny, homophobia and anti-semitism can be considered policy positions.

And that brings me to the concluding paragraphs of Robert Hubbell’s newsletter.

Trump’s mugshot will become the defining image of Trump for all time. His facial expression conveys equal parts menace, anger, and defiance. There is no hint of a soul behind the eyes, only animal grievance and feral resentment at being cornered. It is astounding that a mugshot could capture the essence of evil that resides beneath the surface in Donald Trump.

The photo is also a mugshot of MAGA extremism. It captures the hostility and meanness that animates most of the GOP’s “agenda”—including policies that demean and discriminate against Blacks, women, LGBTQ people, educators, scientists, and immigrants. Trump’s mugshot will likewise become the defining image of MAGA extremism for all time. Tens of millions of MAGA adherents will celebrate and glorify the image—confirming the virulent strain of authoritarianism that has infected the MAGA base.

Not just authoritarianism; hatred..raw hatred for the people who have stolen their preferred vision of America–a vision in which straight White (pseudo) Christian men rule the roost. Virtually every Republican candidate, local, state and federal, is pandering to the angry and fearful  members of a MAGA cult that has replaced a once respectable party. 

Hubbell focuses on the rest of the electorate.

By making this gargoyle of hate the “face” of the 2024 GOP campaign, Republicans are reinforcing the suspicions and fears of tens of millions of Republicans and swing voters who are looking for a reason not to vote for Trump—or to stay home. (As they did on debate night by boycotting his Tucker Carlson interview.)  

 Against the deeply unsettling MAGA mugshot, Democrats will feature the kindly face of Joe Biden as he reaches to pet a rescue dog or hug a survivor of the Hawaii wildfires. Joe Biden may be older than some would like, but his face exhibits kindness and wisdom. We should not underestimate visceral reactions to human decency—or lack thereof—in our leaders.

I sure hope he’s right.

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Okay–Let’s Talk About Free Speech

I haven’t posted about the indictment filed against Donald Trump by Jack Smith, because everyone  else in the universe is contributing to that discussion. But one element of those analyses/debates sets my hair on fire.

Nothing about this prosecution is about Free Speech. Nothing!

I taught my classes in Law and Public Policy through a constitutional lens. I spent the first part of the semester on what I call the “constitutional architecture”–very much including the Bill of Rights. (I was always shocked by the number of students who came to class totally unaware that the First Amendment protects citizens against government censorship–not from other people’s negative responses.)

When we came to freedom of speech, I wanted students to understand the difference between speech–defined as the constitutionally-protected communication of an idea, no matter how wrong or stupid or hurtful–and action, including action effectuated through speech.

Some of the examples I used:

  • I tell you I’ll make you a great deal on a diamond ring. It turns out to be a cubic zirconium. My representations that it was a diamond aren’t protected “speech,” they are fraud–a criminal action.
  • I call you every 15 minutes and scream at you over the phone. You call the police. I protest that I am engaging in freedom of speech. I’m wrong–harassment is an action, and the government has a right to proscribe it.
  • I’m a police officer, and I’m sitting in a restaurant booth. I hear the people in the next booth planning to rob the local bank. One says, “okay, I have the car. You have the gun. I’ve cased the place, and if you are there promptly at two, when the security officers shift, you should be able to get in and out by ten after, and I’ll be waiting.” A conversation of this specificity (unless they are actors rehearsing a scene!) constitutes the initial steps–actions–of the commission of a crime. I need not wait until they are in the middle of that bank robbery–I’m entitled to arrest them now.
  • You are a MAGA fanatic, and you regularly post diatribes to social media about how horrible Joe Biden is, how government and the “deep state” cannot be trusted and how you regularly pray for the painful death of all Democrats. Aside from your social media screeds, you take no action to harm anyone. That’s free speech, and you’re home free–at least, when it comes to the criminal law. (If you accuse specific political foes of being pedophiles or Satanists or whatever, you will risk a civil suit for libel or defamation, but absent credible threats and/or concrete actions to harm someone, you will not face criminal prosecution.)

Bribery, Insider trading. Identity theft and selling state secrets to foreign governments are other examples of crimes committed via speech.

One of the reasons people get confused about what free speech is and what it isn’t is the fact that “speech”–that is, transmission of a message– can be accomplished without words. (The legalese is “symbolic speech.”)

Burning a flag (assuming you own that flag and you aren’t violating a dry weather “no burning” ordinance) is protected by the First Amendment, because the whole purpose of that act is to send a message that the burner disapproves of the country. It’s a message that angers a lot of people, but that doesn’t justify government punishing it.

Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois or Charlottesville, Virginia are sending an equally clear message, even without the latter’s accompanying chants. We all know what that message is, and–again, absent violence, vandalism or other hooliganism–it’s protected by the First Amendment.

The text of the Trump Indictment acknowledged that his lies were protected speech. Whether he believed them or not is irrelevant–so long as he was only posting his crazed diatribes and screaming about the election being rigged, the First Amendment protected him. Once he took concrete actions to overturn the results of the election and remain in power, however, the Free Speech clause no longer applied.

I’ve read several columns by people who should know better, gravely opining that prosecutors will have to establish whether Trump actually believed the garbage he was spewing, and noting that making such a showing is difficult. Those writers need to re-take  high school civics. As a better-educated pundit noted, I may be genuinely convinced that I am entitled to your car, but stealing it is still a crime.

Trump’s MAGA defenders can scream about the Department of Justice “criminalizing” Free Speech,  but those protestations will only sound plausible to people who slept through their high school government class.

This whole debate proves my point about the deplorable level of Americans’ civic literacy.

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