2016 Election, Journalism, Trump

The Ministry of Truth…

 

      “By the way, newspapers are the first of over 50 companies that I started where my employees tell me how to run my business.”

Sheldon Adleson. Casino billionaire, Trump supporter, newspaper owner

——–

There is a move afoot to bring a National Football League team to the city where things that happen there stay there. The most likely team to relocate to Sin City are, at least by Las Vegas terms, the aptly named Oakland Raiders, owned now by Mark Davis son of one the original NFL bad boys Al Davis.zVFIAIDi

But, as ESPN reported recently, the “sins” of Al Davis, including a penchant for litigation, might not hamper his son’s ambition to embrace the Valhalla of American excessiveness, the Shanghai of Sin.

The NFL and its billionaire owners once took a dim view of gambling, which ruled out locating a team where people bet on games all the time, but the NFL’s oligarchs have now set aside any misgivings about either excess or sin. What happens in Vegas wouldn’t really stay there, but would flow out across the country fattening the wallets of NFL owners. So bring on the Raiders, bring on billionaire Sheldon Adelson and bring on the money, money, money.

In order to host an NFL team, Vegas needs a big ol’ stadium and boy oh boy does Sheldon Adelson think building one is a great idea. His recently acquired Review-Journal newspaper – the Adleson clan originally attempted to keep its purchase of the paper secret – has lavished uncritical front-page coverage on idea of building the stadium, while breathlessly endorsing the convoluted financing that has been proposed. Meanwhile, as he maneuvers to bring the NFL to southern Nevada, Adelson has pledged $100 million to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and has his aides at work creating a Trump Super PAC.

Sheldon Adelson
Sheldon Adelson

Another of Trump’s billionaire friends recently secretly financed a lawsuit aimed at destroying an internet media outlet, a move that, at the least, will have a chilling effect for other outlets reporting on the lives of America’s high roller class.

The richest family in Utah now owns the venerable Salt Lake Tribune and, of course, Rupert Murdoch is in a class all his own. Influence is a growth industry even if real journalism is not.

What a country.

Adelson is frequently referred to as a “supporter” or “financial contributor” to the Las Vegas stadium project and perhaps a part owner on a relocated team, but it is clear, at least when it comes to football, that Adelson is really not that much of a gambling man. Back in January before his minions at the Review-Journal began sanitizing coverage of the stadium proposal the paper actually reported some news about who will pay for the expected $1.2 billion football palace.

“Developers would seek $780 million in public financing, according to a document provided by Las Vegas Sands Corp., which is leading a consortium behind the project,” the R-J reported.

“Private investors would contribute $420 million toward the planned 65,000-seat stadium, with various tourist-driven tax sources — commercial conveyance on taxicabs, rental car taxes or hotel room taxes — providing the bulk of the funding.”

Other accounts have indicated that the Mark Davis owner’s contribution will be conditioned on $200 million “loan” from the NFL, further decreasing the contribution of “private investors” like Adelson. It doesn’t take a PhD in finance to see who is really going to pay for the new stadium. At least two-thirds of the cost will be born by the public.

A former Review-Journal columnist, John L. Smith wrote recently in The Daily Beast: “There’s been a conspicuous lack of skepticism in the local press, which with few exceptions has obsessed on the odds of the Raiders’ arrival instead of the audacity of the stadium’s financing plan. Only political journalist Jon Ralston has consistently questioned the deal’s leaps of faith and lack of transparency.”

Ralston, Nevada’s most respected political journalist, has also reported on the “gag order” that prompted Smith’s departure from the paper. Smith had aggressively covered the big name Vegas casino moguls, including Adelson and Steve Winn, for years, often quite critically and that coverage occasional brought a lawsuit. Now, under the new Adelson regime, Smith was ordered not to write about anyone who had ever sued him. Poof. There goes coverage of the Las Vegas power structure.151222212046-las-vegas-review-journal-sign-780x439

Oh, yes. I forgot to mention that before Sheldon Adelson bought the Review-Journal the paper had been an outspoken critic of the process of financing a Las Vegas stadium project.

Now – are you surprised – the paper calls the stadium a “must do” project.

Adelson denies, of course, that his attempt to secretly buy Nevada’s largest newspaper at a cost substantially over its market value and then use it as a sort of house ad to enrich his Vegas hotel and entertainment empire carries any sinister connotations. If you want to believe that I know where you can buy a bridge.

With the “news business” now as fluid and in flux as it has been in generations, perhaps we should welcome guys with fat wallets bringing new resources to newsrooms, as Adelson claims he is doing in Las Vegas and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos clearly has done at the Washington Post. Still, put me down as a skeptic about the altruism of billionaires. As the New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg says, “billionaires do not become billionaires by being passive about their own interests.”

America has a rich history of rich guys owning newspapers – Hearst, Pulitzer and McCormick, to name just a few – and using their power to advance their interests and punish their foes, but this new trend of billionaires meddling in the media somehow seems more sinister and more dangerous, perhaps because it is happening at a time when so much of the media is financially weakened and vulnerable.

So this is America in the 21st Century. The Republican candidate for president calls for a crack down on a free press and wants to change libel laws, he routinely denies access to media organizations that offer critical (read factual) coverage of his nonsense and labels as “sleaze” reporters who dare ask legitimate questions. Meanwhile some of the pals of the Number One Media Critic in the country – fellow oligarchs all – use their unlimited money to intimidate and influence reporters, editors and news organizations. Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth” doesn’t seem all that far fetched in 2016.

The rise of the American demagogue and the companion triumph of the fabulously wealthy has happened for many reasons, not least because there unfortunately exists an ill-informed or misinformed American public. It also doesn’t help that we have a political class that encourages a Sheldon Adelson and his favorite candidate.

It’s a leap of faith to believe that a bunch of self-obsessed billionaires owning their own newspapers is going to improve this dangerous reality. The old journalistic notion that the job of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable has been turned on its head.

 

2016 Election, Clinton, Trump

How to Beat Donald Trump…

 

      “The poll suggests that Trump has more vulnerabilities than Clinton, but that opposition to the former secretary of state can lead some voters with a mixed to unfavorable view of Trump to support him nonetheless.”

Detail from the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll

——–

One key lesson from two of the most recent presidential campaigns holds the key to how a very weak general election candidate, Hillary Clinton, can defeat an unscrupulous, position shifting showman like Donald Trump. Clinton, as is frequently pointed out, has no compelling message, is running a 1990’s campaign based only on a resume. Additionally, she is packing around a heavy load of old, old political baggage.

Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton

If Clinton is to win in November she will need, in the language of scorched earth politics, to “disqualify” Trump. With Trump’s negative poll ratings starting to improve as he consolidates the Republican vote, time is a wasting for Clinton.

As Clinton’s strategists consider their totally unorthodox opponent, the raft of potentially disqualifying material Trump has placed on the public record surely must appear to be an embarrassment of riches. But there is folly in attempting to throw all that Trump garbage back at the voters. It’s just too much.

Clinton Needs a Strategy…

Clinton will make a strategic error – potentially fatal – if she over plays the fact that should she win she will become the first woman elected president of the United States. It’s a natural for her and her supporters to suggest this as a compelling message, but even Trump’s toxic standing with many women doesn’t necessarily mean the so called “women’s card” will be a winner. Clinton’s own negatives may well trump – pardon the pun – any advantage that goes with the potential of being first.

Clinton's challenge: Destroy the myth
Clinton’s challenge: Destroy the myth

So far the Clinton campaign’s line of attack against the insults, lies and wholesale flips of Trump has been to label the faux billionaire “dangerous” or “unfit to be president.” He is demonstrably both, but given Clinton’s dismal approval ratings and her own struggles with the question of whether she is fit for high office make her attacks limp and largely ineffective.

Clinton must focus her Trump message and simplify for voters as to precisely why the bragging, blustering con man is unfit. She must also carry the fight to Trump. She needs to land blows because Trump has already proven he’s a much better counterpuncher that Clinton will ever be.

Let’s just admit the obvious: this is going to be a disgustingly nasty contest. Both candidates are widely disliked. This will be an election about tearing down, not building up. Who does the best job of defining the other person will win.

Trump has already accused Bill Clinton of rape and repeatedly labeled the former secretary of state “crooked.” Coming from a guy who accused the father of his chief Republican rival of being involved in John Kennedy’s assassination, rape and crookedness represent merely the mere tip of Trump’s sleazy general election iceberg of political slime. Brace yourselves.

Attacking a Con Man Where He’s Most Vulnerable…

Clinton needs to move quickly – certainly no later than the Republican convention and perhaps much earlier – to systematically define Trump around what appears to be his strongest advantage: his business success, his money, the very notion that his high rolling ways somehow qualify him to move into the White House. By focusing on Trump’s “character” as a real estate developer and an allegedly successful businessman, Clinton truly has a target rich environment that voters can grasp.

One of many, many failures
One of many, many failures

Trump’s business failures – a smelly pile of “Trump steaks” and “Trump Vodka” and “Trump Airlines” – his several bankruptcies, the failure of “Trump University,” the recent claim that his tax returns “are none of your business,” his multitude of shady deals with questionable characters and his extraordinary litigiousness add up to a credibility bomb waiting to go off. The most devoted Trump followers will shrug off this cavalcade of business sleaze, but many voters, particularly independent leaning voters, will discover that at the soul of this con man is a con job.

In the recent Washington Post-ABC News poll that shows the two candidates virtually tied is this nugget: “Six in 10 independents believe Trump should release his taxes, and almost all of them say they feel strongly about it. Even 44 percent of Republicans want the billionaire businessman to release his returns before the November election, though they are less passionate.”

Trump signing the tax return he refuses to release
Trump signing the tax return he refuses to release

Trump, of course, probably cannot release his tax returns because it’s almost certain he rarely, if ever, pays any tax. The one year his returns were a matter of public record, thanks to a requirement of the New Jersey gaming commission, Trump paid zero tax. Offshore accounts? He must have some. In what state does he claim residence? New York or Florida? If he’s been audited as often as he says, what did those audits show? Has he paid penalties?

Raise the questions. Taunt the tax dodger. As Lyndon Johnson might have said, make the SOB deny that he doesn’t play by the same rules the rest of us follow.

Trump’s recent release of a personal financial disclosure (PFD) statement, a statement as bogus as his claim that he will build a “beautiful wall” along the Mexican border, is ripe for the pulling apart. Trump brags of “great cash flow” and huge “revenue increases” at his properties, but that is, at best, misleading since we know nothing about his expenses and he offers (as usual) no proof for his claims. As Forbes magazine noted in an article on Trump’s PFD the statement raises more questions that it answers, “Since Trump freely interchanges the terms revenue and income as if they mean the same thing.” This guy may have graduated from the Wharton School, but he can’t read his own balance sheet.

And, as Forbes also noted, “the Office of Government Ethics reviews the disclosures for technical compliance (for example, assets have to be properly categorized), but does not audit for accuracy, nor are candidates required to provide supporting documents to prove their numbers.” In short, the Trump statement of his net worth is as confused and phony as his hairdo.

Trump University: Subject of an ongoing lawsuit
Trump University: Subject of an ongoing lawsuit

Bloomberg had a great piece recently headlined “How Trump’s Self Worth Became His Net Worth,” focusing on the fact that most of Trump’s much hyped wealth is based upon his own perceived value of his name.

Bloomberg’s Steven Mihm observed, “In Trump’s case, the value of his name is a complicated notion, resting on both the “right to publicity” as well as the more conventional foundations of trademark law (Trump has filed more 200 trademark applications, including Donald J. Trump, The Fragrance).” That fragrance smells to high heaven.

Timothy L. O’Brien has been following Trump’s business boasts for years and he writes, also in Bloomberg: “Trump, who flirted with personal bankruptcy in the early ’90s, has never publicly offered an independently vetted assessment of all his debts. Indeed, much of the financial information he discloses is self-reported. Until that changes, there’s a good chance that a strong dose of grade inflation runs through all of the net worth figures.”

Let’s put a finer point on it: Donald Trump is a fraud, which sounds like a good tagline for a television ad campaign.

The Model Already Exists…

Screen shot of 2004 "Swift Boat Veterans" ad against John Kerry
Screen shot of 2004 “Swift Boat Veterans” ad against John Kerry

The models for a Clinton strategy of taking apart The Donald are – I hesitate to say – the shameful “Swift Boating” of then-Senator John Kerry in 2004 and the often unfair characterizations in 2012 of Mitt Romney’s private equity career at Bain Capital. In both those cases, the opponents of Kerry and Romney – George W. Bush and Barack Obama – made strategic decisions to attack at a point of the opponent’s apparent greatest strength.

Kerry was a legitimate and highly decorated Vietnam War veteran and Romney was a demonstrably successful businessman. But the relentless attacks shredded the fundamental strengths of Kerry and Romney to the very great benefit of the ultimately winning candidates.

In fairness, many of the most effective attacks against Kerry and Romney were carried out by so called “independent” campaigns legally separate from the presidential candidates. But, unless you were born last night it’s impossible to believe that the 2004 and 2012 attacks were not conceived as part of the overall strategy of the Bush and Obama campaigns.

Kerry didn’t deserve the “swift boating” and much of the story line about Romney was based on inherent skepticism about his success in an industry that often cut jobs as a business strategy. Trump, on the other hand, is in an entirely different world. He deserves all the scrutiny he should be getting.

The Wizard Unmasked
The Wizard Unmasked

Political generals, like military generals, often mistakenly fight the last war, but in 2016 the lessons from presidential campaigns in 2004 and 2012 hold the most valuable lessons for the Democratic campaign.

Attacking the phony billionaire where he is perceived to be the strongest is a winning approach. Millions of Americans are upset with their presidential choices and many are fed up with a political system that has come perilously close to imploding, but they will understand a self-proclaimed billionaire that doesn’t pay taxes and they will be able to analyze the evidence about a guy whose entire rationale for his candidacy is built around a level of business success that simply doesn’t exist.

Donald Trump’s business acumen is a little like the “all powerful” Wizard of Oz in the famous movie. Once you pull back the curtain you’ll find a little, insecure man who has spent a lifetime bragging about his accomplishments, a man living an illusion, a man who has gotten away with a con job it for a very long time.

Exposing Trump’s business record will also have the added benefit for Clinton of diverting the egomaniac from his own attacks on her. Can you imagine Trump’s response to a sustained assault on his most valuable asset – his self-image as a successful tycoon? It would be a fine thing to watch.

It’s time to get on with pulling back the curtain.

 

2016 Election, Arizona, John McCain, Trump

The Last Tango of John McCain

 

      “If Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket, here in Arizona, with over 30 percent of the vote being the Hispanic vote, no doubt that this may be the race of my life.”

           Senator John McCain who says he will support the GOP nominee.

——–

Let’s call it the Trump Tango, the awkward, unprincipled, downright disgusting dance of various Republican politicians desperate to get right with their “presumptive nominee.” The stumble to the dance floor with Trump comes, of course, after the same crowd spent months believing their new best friend to be, as John Boehner might say, “the devil incarnate.”

Still, unlike the sexy Latin dance, this political tango has no grace, no style, no elegance. The Trump Tango is only about ending up in the same place locked in an uncomfortable partisan embrace when the music finally stops.

Senator Kelly Ayotte
Senator Kelly Ayotte

New Hampshire Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte, a vulnerable GOP incumbent in this weird, wild year, is a prime example of one of the delicate dancers. Ayotte says she will vote for the bumptious billionaire, but quickly adds that we shouldn’t consider that an endorsement. You might call that dancing on eggshells.

Paul Ryan, the highest-ranking Republican in the country, began his own graceless tango toward Trump a few days ago. Emerging from a closed-door meeting with the man who has repeatedly dissed his policy proposals, including Medicare and Social Security reform, the Speaker indicated he is warming to Trump’s dance music of racism, Muslim bans, narcissism and misogyny.

A Warm and Genuine Person…

“I was very encouraged with what I heard from Donald Trump today,” Ryan said, “I do believe that we are now planting the seeds to get ourselves unified, to bridge the gaps and differences.” Right.

House Speaker Paul Ryan AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
House Speaker Paul Ryan AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Proving that he can dance backward while wearing high heels, Ryan is clearly pirouetting in the direction of turning the last remnants of the Republican Party over to the charlatan from Queens. “He’s a very warm and genuine person,” Ryan concluded about the man who regularly calls people who challenge him “losers” or “dopes” or “clowns.” Such calm and measured language from the presumptive nominee obviously passes for “warm and genuine” in the new Trump-led GOP. Can the full Paul Ryan embrace followed by the deep swoon be far away?

At least Ryan hesitated before his inevitable jump into Donald Trump’s arms, signaling at least a momentary brush with genuine political principle. By contrast the one-time captain of the “Plain Talk Express” toppled like an old, tired, withered Sonoran saguaro.

John McCain is, of course, running for re-election in Arizona. He has two Tea Party challengers in the August primary and, assuming he survives, McCain will face a very creditable Democrat, Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick, in November. McCain is already forecasting the most difficult election he had ever had. Given his shameless embrace of Trumpism he deserves everything he’s going to get.

With Trump at the head of the ticket the one-time “maverick” had to make a choice: he could resist embracing a man that puts the lie to most everything McCain once stood for or he could set aside all principle in the interest of political self-preservation and dance with the devil. McCain has made his choice and The Last Tango of the Maverick has indeed become a sorry spectacle.

Not Oscar and Felix, but certainly an odd couple.
Not Oscar and Felix, but certainly an odd couple.

McCain, perhaps as much as any incumbent Republican in the country, is caught in the ethical and political dilemma that the party has created for itself.

McCain once earned considerable bi-partisan support for pushing back against the tax and spend policies of George W. Bush’s Administration. He worked across the aisle to try and ensure that the Senate actually confirmed qualified judicial nominees. He forged alliances with Democrats to try and limit the corruption of big money in our politics. He once advocated immigration reform. McCain even once shut down a woman at one of his rallies who launched a tirade about Barack Obama being “an Arab.”

Now, afraid to confront the Tea Party, McCain caters to the original birther and supports a guy who disparages his own military record.

I Like People Who Weren’t Captured…

Admittedly it can be difficult to keep all the Trump insults straight, so as a reminder it was way back in July of last year when McCain became one of Trump’s first high profile insult targets. McCain had criticized Trump’s racist rants about Hispanics and worried that such incendiary rhetoric would, as he said, “bring out the crazies” in Arizona. Trump, of course, did what he does – he attacked.

Trump, having never served a day in the military, dissed McCain’s six years of torture and imprisonment in a North Vietnamese POW camp as the story of a loser.

McCain and Sarah Palin
McCain and Sarah Palin in 2008

“(McCain’s) a war hero because he got captured,” General Trump thundered. “I like people who weren’t captured.” Asked later to elaborate, Trump said he wasn’t impressed with McCain’s Senate service since he wasn’t doing enough for veterans. More recently Trump again refused to back off his sleazy comments about McCain saying, in essence, he never apologizes.

On another occasion Trump called the Arizona Republican “another all talk, no action politician who spends too much time on television and not enough time doing his job.” As if spending time on television constituted a political crime in Trumpworld.

But John McCain, the “maverick” straight talker, can’t bring himself to reject the hate monger who has appropriated his party. As E.J. Montini, the political columnist for the Arizona Republic notes, McCain is really concerned only about getting re-elected.

“Instead of being direct and plain-spoken,” Montini wrote recently, McCain is “being cautious and political, calculated.

“He’s teeter-tottering on a tightrope between appeasing the Trump voters he wants and the Latino voters he needs, trying not to topple in either direction.

“As for the ‘Straight Talk Express’ – call a tow truck, it’s out of gas.”

If any Republican had both a reason and the gumption to tell Donald Trump to kiss him where he sits it ought to be John McCain. Surely McCain privately agonizes over a presidential candidate who praises Putin, advocates a return to torture, talks loosely about encouraging nuclear proliferation and will, should he be elected, demand about as much respect from the American military as Jane Fonda.

Still, McCain says he will support the nominee of his party. There is apparently nothing that would disqualify this charlatan. Republicans, and even John McCain, are proving to be partisans first, last and always. When it comes to the presumptive nominee, like his party, McCain has abandoned the last shred of principle in order to rally behind a man – it’s not even a close call – most Republicans know is a dangerous fraud.

McCain might have made his last go round an example of class and courage. He might have danced to a different drummer. He might have called Trump what he is. But he did none of those things. And, who knows, the abandonment of principle may work. McCain may well win re-election by hitching his wagon to Trump’s phony politics, but if he goes down in flames with the crass, conniving businessman it would amount to a certain type of poetic justice. Giving in to a clown only makes one look like a clown.

McCain has long courted Arizona’s large and expanding Hispanic population. He needs a certain degree of support from Arizona’a Hispanic community to win a general election and he might have calculated that telling the truth about Trump would position him well with Hispanics, but he didn’t. McCain instead embraced the very “crazies” he once predicted would come out of the woodwork to support a fundamentally race-baiting candidate. The maverick has become the enabler.

Win or lose this is undoubtedly McCain’s last campaign. The old John McCain might have gone out being remembered for something better than creating Sarah Palin, a decision, which come to think of it, helped create Donald Trump. Yet, McCain’s last tango has turned into a stumbling lurch. As Trump might say – Sad.

 

2016 Election, Clinton, Trump

The GOP’s Joe McCarthy Moment


     

     “Donald Trump delivered a very good foreign policy speech in which he laid out his vision for American engagement in the world.”

Statement by Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker.

——–

The nation’s Republican “elites” have entered the final stage of grief – acceptance.

After wringing their hands for months over the prospect that the most demonstrably unprepared person to every get near a presidential nomination would hijack their party and drive it over a cliff, the GOP “elites” now face the almost certain reality that a race-baiting, woman-hating, foreign policy clueless narcissist will be their presidential candidate.

The denial, distress, disbelief and all the “stop Trump” efforts have now arrived at what conservative columnist David Brooks calls “a Joe McCarthy moment.” Every Republican officeholder, every consultant and lobbyist, every American conservative who wakes up, looks in the mirror and sees an engaged, thoughtful citizen will forever be measured by where they stood on the defining political issue of our time: Do you support Trump?

Republicans once had the guts to say “No” to a man bent on destroying their party and the country. Will enough of them do it again?

The GOP’s McCarthy Moment…

Vermont Senator Ralph Flanders
Vermont Senator Ralph Flanders

In the 1950’s, Republican members of the United States Senate, not Joe McCarthy’s Democratic opponents, finally brought the red-baiting, fear-promoting GOP demagogue of that generation to heel. Vermont Republican Ralph Flanders stood on the Senate floor on March 9, 1954 and spoke directly to McCarthy. It was the beginning of the end of the McCarthy Era. Read the speech today in the Era of Trump, 62 years after Flanders spoke, and its insights ring true, eerily so.

“Mr. President,” Flanders said, “the junior senator from Wisconsin interests us all – there can be no doubt about that – but also he puzzles some of us. To which party does he belong? Is he a hidden satellite of the Democratic Party, to which he is furnishing so much material for quiet mirth? It does not seem that his Republican label can be stuck on very tightly, when, by intention or through ignorance, he is doing his best to shatter the party whose label he wears. He no longer claims or wants any support from the Communist fringe. What is his party affiliation?”

Flanders conclusion about Joe McCarthy then could well be applied to Donald Trump today. “One must conclude that his is a one-man party, and that its name is ‘McCarthyism,” a title which he has proudly accepted.”

McCarthy, driven by ego and political opportunism, was missing the point, Flanders argued. America had enemies to confront and issues to address, just not the ones McCarthy pursued blindly and ruthlessly. Trump is the second coming of the authentic Republican demagogue.

Not all of Flanders’ constituents approved of his speech, but many did and  the bookish Vermonter – he authored or co-authored eight books – had his McCarthy moment, which still stands as an enduring example of great political courage and genuine intellectual honesty. Flanders later introduced the resolution that ultimately led to McCarthy’s censure by the Senate.

Even then Senate Republicans split evenly over condemning an odious and dangerous man. Twenty-one Republicans joined Ralph Flanders in rejecting McCarthy and his tactics. Twenty-two others have had to answer to history for failing to condemn a fomenter of discord and discontent.

Trump and Christie. Photo by Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Trump and Christie. Photo by Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The shameless and self-promotional among the GOP have, of course, already made their decision about Trump. Chris Christie, once a semi-serious political figure who might have re-defined his own diminished brand by shunning Donald J. Trump, did just the opposite. Christie blew past his McCarthy moment and voted demagogue.

Newt Gingrich, the disgraced former House Speaker who is just as desperate to remain “relevant” as Christie, allows as how he would be available to serve as Trump’s running mate should the great man pick up a gold plated cellphone and bring Gingrich back to political life.

The Shameless and Self-Promotional…

Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions endorsed Trump early, as did Trump’s female political doppelgänger Sarah Palin. And Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, who has already endorsed two other Republican candidates, now says, “It looks to me like he’s going to win, and if he does, I’m going to do everything in my power to help him.” Even the formerly sane Jon Huntsman says Trump’s his guy.

Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker, often an example of the levelheaded conservative, sent shivers down the spine recently when he actually praised Trump’s completely incoherent “major foreign policy speech.” It was the precise moment, with all Trump’s ignorance and bluster on display, for the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to declare the blowhard-in-chief unfit for the awesome responsibilities he seeks. Corker punted. Count on more doing the same. Count on them living to regret it.

In addition to their McCarthy moment, the Republican Party, at least the “elites,” face an existential question: Do they embrace this awful man, the very essence of division and lack of seriousness? Or do they broadly reject the modern equivalent of Joe McCarthy and risk, as a Ralph Flanders did in the 1950’s, the wrath of those drawn to his message of division and hatred? Either way they risk blowing up their party for an election cycle or maybe a generation or maybe forever.

Trump’s new political wise guy, Paul Manafort, a fellow who made his political fortune representing repressive thugs from places like Ukraine and Angola, is confident the “elites” will come around to his new boss. “As he becomes the Republican nominee, there will be a consolidation behind him,” Manafort told the Washington Post’s Dan Balz. “Once he is the nominee, some of that is going to come down naturally. . . . It’s a big deal when you’re the presumptive nominee as opposed to being the nominee.”

Joe McCarthy and his counsel, Roy Cohn, who tutored Donald Trump in the arts of politics
Joe McCarthy and his counsel, Roy Cohn, who late in his life tutored Donald Trump in the art of nasty politics

The media will also get even more on board as the general election nears. The political press, particularly television, which loves the thought of the looming contest between Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton and has done so much to enable Trump’s rise, will soon began to offer up more of what we might call the “coverage of false equivalency.”

Trump’s utter lack of political experience will continue to be portrayed as an advantage as opposed to the grievous risk it represents. His shady business dealings and stunning lack of historical perspective on foreign policy will receive short shrift when he turns full-time to trashing “Crooked Hillary.” And trivialities like Trump’s endorsement by the reprehensible character that once coached the Indiana University basketball team is treated as if it mattered to the future of the republic. It doesn’t, by the way.

Do They Really Hate Hillary So Much…

The company Trump’s keeps, from Bobby Knight – Trump misspelled the name of his “dear friend” – who was given to throwing chairs and assaulting his players, to convicted sex offender Mike Tyson, is treated as though it is all just part of a rollicking reality television show passing as a presidential campaign. It should be reported for what it is, a window into what passes for the man’s soul. Get over waiting for the media, especially television, to bring down Trump. That’s like waiting for Godot. Not going to happen.

Clinton’s flat-footed, unimaginative, uninspiring candidacy is apparently all that now stands in Trump’s way and (I can’t believe I’m writing this) it may not be enough. Trump has controlled the political narrative every single day since he slid down his own escalator and into position as Republican frontrunner. There is no reason to believe he won’t continue to dominate, unless that is those with standing in the party he plans to takeover decide to really push back.

This is their Joe McCarthy moment. Do they really hate Hillary so much they would risk turning the country, not to mention their party, over to this dangerous buffoon?

Senate GOP Leadership: Waiting for Trump
Senate GOP Leadership: Waiting for Trump

In a remarkable and utterly sobering article in the most recent New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan summed up our national dilemma: “An American elite that has presided over massive and increasing public debt, that failed to prevent 9/11, that chose a disastrous war in the Middle East, that allowed financial markets to nearly destroy the global economy, and that is now so bitterly divided the Congress is effectively moot in a constitutional democracy: ‘We Respectables’ deserve a comeuppance. The vital and valid lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that if the elites cannot govern by compromise, someone outside will eventually try to govern by popular passion and brute force.”

Enter Trumpism.

Republicans, of course, brought much of this on themselves, but pointing that out now is about as useful as engaging in the false equivalency that says the candidacy of a hateful, arrogant, uninformed demagogue is really just the same as that of an experienced candidate. Even with her all too obvious “trust” issues, Clinton has served as first lady, a U.S. senator and secretary of state. She is competent and informed. The almost certain Democratic nominee isn’t my first or even eighth choice for president of the United States, but good lord she is no Donald Trump.

Andrew Sullivan puts it directly to those Republicans who waffle and waver about whether to push in their chips with Trump, as well as those who will just pretend to ignore him. “They should resist any temptation to loyally back the nominee or to sit this election out,” he writes. “They must take the fight to Trump at every opportunity, unite with Democrats and Independents against him, and be prepared to sacrifice one election in order to save their party and their country.

“For Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such.”

A handful of Republican consultants, a few conservative journalists and columnists and one GOP senator, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, have drawn a line they will not cross to support a political pretender. It’s not enough.

This really is a Joe McCarthy moment for the Republican Party and the nation. Republicans should be asking where are the Ralph Flanders?

 

2016 Election, Clinton, Trump

Year of the Smackdown

 

          “Highly negative views of 2016’s leading candidates may reflect the hyperpartisan climate that has been building in recent years, also evident in previously unseen levels of ideological polarization among primary voters this year. There’s also the level of in-party factionalism this year, especially on the Republican side.”

Recent ABC News poll showing high levels of Trump/Clinton unpopularity

———-

We all know that this political year is an outlier, a set of conditions and candidates so far from the norm that it has confounded pundits, politicians and most of the public. We haven’t seen this combination of nastiness, nativism and nonsense for many a year. Unusual it is, but also perhaps a bitter taste of all that is to come.

Maybe, just maybe, the interminable, dispiriting process of selecting a new president, and the choices the process has produced, merely offers a sour sample of the new face of American democracy. It’s not even close to morning in America, more like nightfall. Cloudy with a chance of chaos.

Disliked and not trusted
Disliked and not trusted

A gnawing realization is settling in. The current campaign may represent nothing less than what the nation will look like far into the future – profoundly divided, deeply cynical, irrationally angry and distressingly unable to confront, let alone solve, big and pressing problems.

Call it the death of aspiration. Label it democracy in decline. This new normal is accelerating the country toward an ominous political cliff. Where once we aspired to the optimistic, sunny uplands of a Kennedy or a Reagan we now settle for so much less. It’s not like we haven’t seen this coming. Now its here.

If things continue as they have over the last six months both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will limp across the finish line, struggling and fussing all the way, to capture the nomination of their parties. Yet, each will also have been broadly rejected by significant numbers of voters in their own parties.

One party, angry, disillusioned and ready for a fight, at least with itself, seems prepared to embrace a man who wants nothing so much as to be taken seriously, but who is also the most seriously unprepared candidate for national office since, well, since Sarah Palin. The other party will likely nominate a candidate whose overriding rationale for running is that she’ll be the first, but who is unable to excite a younger generation of women (or men) who view her as both yesterday’s recycled news and as profoundly untrustworthy.

People who will not win nominations this year are vastly more respected than those who will. Republican voters like John Kasich much better than their likely candidate. Ditto for Democrats and Bernie Sanders. If it is Clinton v. Trump in November we will see a contest between two of the most unpopular, least trusted and most severely flawed candidates in modern times. It will be like Andrew Johnson running against Warren Harding.

From a historical standpoint the election of 2016 may be remembered as the moment that defined new political boundaries, or more likely limitations. Ironically, both of the leading candidates have defied political tradition by basing their campaigns on the past: Clinton finds herself both invoking and rejecting the presidency of her husband – an administration now a quarter century distant – with all of its messy and tawdry contradictions, while Trump promises to “Make America Great Again” without ever suggesting what era of American greatness he has in mind. In both cases the candidates present a yearning for something lost and not a realistic vision for a renewed America.

The Age of Trumpism and Clintonism…

Still, the two frontrunners, as Michael Lind wrote recently in the New York Times, define, distressingly so, the future of American politics. “No matter who wins the New York primaries on Tuesday or which candidates end up as the presidential nominees of the two major parties, one thing is already clear: Trumpism represents the future of the Republicans and Clintonism the future of the Democrats.

“Those who see the nationalist populism of Mr. Trump as an aberration in a party that will soon return to free-market, limited government orthodoxy are mistaken,” Lind writes. “So are those who believe that the appeal of Senator Bernie Sanders to the young represents a repudiation of the center-left synthesis shared by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. In one form or another, Trumpism and Clintonism will define conservatism and progressivism in America.”

Or, put another way, the holy war for the future shape of the American political experiment will play out as it has for most of the last quarter century with likely even more anger and division and with less middle ground and common sense. Both candidates promise something new, but Trumpism and Clintonism are more correctly a doubling down on the politics of dysfunction that have given us repeated fights over issues like the debt ceiling and repeal of Obamacare.

Does anyone really think a Hillary Clinton nominee to the Supreme Court will offer anything but a further politicization of the court or that a Republican Party that Trump has led into the fevered swamps of anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim hatred will suddenly come to its senses on the immigration and refugee crisis?

Clinton has never met a war she didn’t like and Trump can’t spell NATO, but would do away with it nonetheless. Don’t expect either candidate – or president – to fundamentally rethink, as it so obviously necessary, America’s frequently disastrous commitments in the Middle East.

Goldman Sachs’ favorite Democrat isn’t any more likely to address the fundamentals of national and global income inequality than is a flaky billionaire given to gold plated bathroom fixtures.

You would think that the anger and disaffection coursing through the American body politic would prompt some serious reflection from serious people about how to accomplish a course correction, but Trump’s idea of reflection is to admire himself in a mirror, while Clinton seems to believe admitting an error, or even an uncertainty, is a sign of weakness. As Maureen Dowd writes Clinton “has shown an unwillingness to be introspective and learn from her mistakes. From health care to Iraq to the email server, she only apologizes at the pointing of a gun. And even then, she leaves the impression that she is merely sorry to be facing criticism, not that she miscalculated in the first place.”

To quote Trump, it’s just “sad.” Months and months of debates, town halls, the Sabbath gasbags, millions – if not billions – in vacuous ads gets us what: A nation horribly divided, unable to generate broad national agreement on any serious priority and led by people most of us don’t trust. This is the new normal. If you liked the last eight years, you’ll love the next four – or forty.

History tells us it is virtually impossible to identify a political crisis until it smacks us in the head, but more and more this feels like the year we get smacked.

 

2016 Election, Media, Television, Trump

Lights and Wires in a Box…

   

    “One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and, at times, demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles.”

                                                                                 – Edward R. Murrow in 1958

——–

The front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination is many things – a narcissist, a psychopath, misogynist, authoritarian, Islamophobic, racist, but also the most accomplished manipulator of mass communication maybe in the history of American politics.

A typical Trump cable TV "hit"
A typical Trump cable TV “hit”

Donald Trump has completely figured out the relentless ebb and flow of modern political communication. He understands in detail the need to “feed the beast” and that the feedstock for television has little to do with substance. The modern news cycle is about always being available, responding immediately and constantly raising the bar of outrageousness. Trump’s unhinged personality and incessant need to be the center of attention is a perfect match for the tools of social media and 24-hour cable news.

Near as I can tell Trump never turns down an interview request unless it’s from Megyn Kelly on Fox, a level of accommodation for cable television’s conflict driven programming that has been irresistible as CNN’s president confirmed recently. Trump “has been much more available than many of the others who have been or are still in the race,” Jeff Zucker said. “Just because he says ‘yes’ and has subjected himself to those interviews, and [other candidates] don’t, I’m not going to penalize him for saying ‘yes.’”

Indeed. why penalize Trump when it is so lucrative to ratings and cash flow to constantly provide a forum? CNN has been charging 40 times it’s normal price for a commercial during the “Republican Debates Starring Donald J. Trump.” Co-dependency is obviously lucrative.

Trump has re-written the rules for the Sunday morning shows featuring what the great Calvin Trillin correctly terms “the Sabbath Gasbags.” Twenty-nine different times since the beginning of the campaign Trump has “phoned it in” to one of the Sunday programs and almost daily he does the same with television’s morning shows.

The telephone “interview” gives the small-fingered vulgarian a home field advantage. He tends to easily dominate these exchanges by filibustering and refusing to be interrupted. By conducting his media outreach by phone, Trump doesn’t have to put himself out by actually showing up in a studio and facing a questioner. As a result he rarely gets asked a follow up question, although he almost never provides a real answer in the first place. The “journalists” know, of course, that they are being played, but until recently everyone played along. Only when Trump’s tactics finally became the focus of print media coverage did Chuck Todd on NBC, for example, call a halt to the phone-a-phon.

CBS Chairman Moonves:
CBS Chairman Moonves: “The money’s rolling in.”

Trump completely understands the weirdly perverse symbiotic relationship that links a no-nothing big-mouthed candidate with the venality that has come to characterize modern television news. The vicious and almost always vacuous cycle of personality and enabler goes something like this: TV needs ratings in order to sell commercial time. Outrage and spectacle drive ratings. Trump delivers outrage and spectacle. TV gives time to Trump. Ratings sore and cash registers ring. Voila!

“Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? … The money’s rolling in and this is fun.” That is a quote from CBS Chairman Les Moonves who spoke last month to a media conference in San Francisco. It was a rare moment of illuminating candor from the top guy at the network that was once home to Cronkite and Murrow. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Moonves continued, “and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”

“There is always a mutually beneficial relationship between candidates and news organizations during presidential years,” writes the New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg. “But in my lifetime it’s never seemed so singularly focused on a single candidacy. And the financial stakes have never been so intertwined with the journalistic and political stakes.” Just ask Les Moonves.

Vulgarity Meets the Broadcaster’s Bottom Line…

By one measure Trump has received nearly two billion dollars in free media coverage since his announcement of candidacy was, of course, carried live on cable television last summer. At one level the Trump phenomenon is easily explained: free advertising works. At least it works with 35-40 percent of the Republican electorate.

The “old media” – read “print” – scrutiny of Trump, by contrast, has been unrelenting and often excellent, with the New York Times and Washington Post producing detailed and often fascinating (as well as disturbing) accounts of the billionaire (is he really?) blowhard’s often unsuccessful business practices. The Post’s recent story on the lawyer Trump tried to conflict out of a lawsuit is both a great piece of reporting and one suspects a genuine glimpse into Trump’s sleazy approach to business and everything else.

Columnists like the Times’ Tim Egan and Frank Bruni have laid bare Trump’s complete disregard of facts and his fourth grade grasp of policy. Conservatives like David Brooks and Michael Gerson, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, have taken on Trump from the right with Gerson particularly challenging Trump enablers like Chris Christie and Ben Carson. Politico’s Roger Simon has a wonderful ability to burst the media bubble around El Trumpo and get to the essence of why he is so unprepared for the job and so dangerous in even seeking the job.

Even the sanctimonious George Will, a Sabbath Gasbag if ever there was one, has consistently hammered Trump, although Will’s groping for the principled high ground is increasingly hard to take since he has been among the chief conservative enablers to the “establishment” Republican Party that has done so much to create a genuine American demagogue.

Still every candidate for alderman knows that in politics you want to get your mug on tube. Trump rails against the “dishonest media,” but really could care less when a well-informed columnist calls him what he is. Trump is all about the airtime.

While media moguls like Moonves and Zucker count their millions it is worth remembering a simpler time when another powerful demagogue ranged across the land. Ed Murrow, the North Carolina-born broadcaster who came of age in the Pacific Northwest, was accused at the time of being late to the dissection of the demagogue from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy. Still, watching Murrow’s riveting thirty-minute takedown of “the junior senator from Wisconsin” in 1954 is a reminder of what television can do to puncture the bloated ego of a dangerous authoritarian.

When Murrow Took on McCarthy…

Senator McCarthy responds to Edward R. Murrow in 1954
Senator McCarthy responds to Edward R. Murrow in 1954

Murrow (and his producer Fred Friendly) used McCarthy’s own words to do him in during their famous See it Now broadcast. In his concluding essay Murrow, the Washington State University grad, reminded his generation that every citizen has a responsibility to speak out when evil lurks in the body politic.

Substitute “Trump” for “McCarthy” and you may experience an eerie sense of déjà vu when reading Murrow’s words from 1954.

“This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

“The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’ Good night, and good luck.”

McCarthy responded the following week, of course, by labeling Murrow a communist dupe. A few months late the Senate censured McCarthy and his influence rapidly cascaded into history.

In his engaging 1970 study of McCarthy and the United States Senate, which for too long abetted his undemocratic tactics, historian Robert Griffith used words that might have been written by a contemporary observer of our politics.

Murrow on the cover of Newsweek in 1954
Murrow on the cover of Newsweek in 1954

“To a considerable degree ‘Joe McCarthy’ was the creation of our communications system,” Griffith wrote in “The Politics of Fear,” his scholarly study of McCarthy, his methods and the Senate. “Like most instruments through which the past is mediated the press was an active and not a passive agent. They very questions asked determined the answers it reported. And these answers in turn shaped the total political context. Nor were these actions always conscious, consistent, or premeditated. The nation’s prestige press was overwhelmingly opposed to McCarthy, yet by the very intensity of its coverage it helped to assure his permanence as a symbol of Republican partisanship.”

Once upon a time executives at CBS, no doubt reluctantly and even frightened by what might happen, had the guts to allow Ed Murrow to unmask Joe McCarthy’s methods. The moment stands as one of the greatest in the history of a medium that has few enough great moments.

In his most famous speech to the Radio-Television News Directors Association in 1958, Murrow offered what is still a remarkably trenchant observation about television. “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.”

But does anyone in a position of authority at the big television conglomerates have the guts and the integrity to make it useful? The network run by the guy who says “Bring it on, Donald. Keep going,” doesn’t seem too likely to turn ’60 Minutes loose, even on a dangerous demagogue.

 

2016 Election, Supreme Court

Waiting for President Trump

 

    “I believe the overwhelming view of the Republican Conference in the Senate is that this nomination should not be filled, this vacancy should not be filled by this lame duck president.” 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell

———

Barack Obama has confounded his political foes by nominating a moderate, consensus-focused, precedent-deferential federal judge to the United States Supreme Court as a replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

Judge Garland and President Obama
Judge Garland and President Obama

Federal Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Merrick Garland is, in short, just the kind of justice we should want on the Supreme Court. With the Court increasingly becoming just another venue to practice a judicial version of our toxic partisan politics, the Garland nomination should be an antidote that begins to correct the broad impression that judges are just politicians in robes. But Mitch McConnell and Company have ruled that out on the completely specious grounds that Obama’s term ended last year and any nomination to the Court is just politics, nothing more or less.

Not that most politicians would waste a split second thinking about what rank partisanship does to public confidence in the judiciary, it is worth nothing that confidence in the Court has been steadily eroding for thirty years according to data from the Pew Center. Those declines correlate nicely – or depressingly – with the partisan battles over the Court that stretch at least back to Robert Bork.

Even Chief Justice John Roberts thinks the confirmation “process is not functioning very well.” Call that a judicial understatement.

All the players have the judicial blood of petty partisanship on their hands. Politicizing the Court is one thing Republicans and Democrats agree upon, even as McConnell and his not-so-merry band lead us into a wholly new judicial confirmation cul-de-sac. Both sides have mined the depths of confirmation history to try and find any weak precedent on which to hang the current partisan fight, but the Republican logic – that the “people” need to be heard and no nominee can be considered until after the election – is particularly devoid of intellectual honesty. In his newfound role as a Republican truth-teller, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham admitted as much.

“We’re setting a precedent here today, the Republicans are, that in the last year — at least of a lame-duck, eight-year term, I would say it’s going to be a four-year term — that you’re not going to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court, based on what we’re doing here today,” Graham said. “That’s going to be the new rule.”

Even if the late Justice Scalia often ignored precedent that didn’t correspond with his personal views of the Constitution, don’t count on the U.S. Senate to ignore in the future the path they have now set for themselves in 2016. The Court becomes one more partisan pawn. It wasn’t always so, or at least it wasn’t always as bad as it is now.

Searching for Precedent…

Republicans have correctly pointed out that it was one hundred years ago when a president of one party had a justice confirmed by a Senate controlled by the other party. The president was Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who actually made two appointments in 1916 – an election year – and both were confirmed. One of those appointments, Louis Brandeis, was controversial. Brandeis was not only the first Jewish member of the Court, but a renowned progressive who had made his career opposing monopoly and the abuses of unregulated capitalism. Still, Brandeis was confirmed by a Republican controlled Senate and went on to become, by most every measure, one of the greatest justices in the history of the Court.

Charles Evans Hughes
Charles Evans Hughes

But consider for a moment the other vacancy Wilson filled in 1916, the seat vacated by the resignation of Associate Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Hughes, the former Republican governor of New York, resigned his Supreme Court seat in order to run for president against Wilson, arguably one of the most partisan acts by any member of the Court in our history.

Hughes narrowly lost that election and then slipped easily back into Republican politics. He served as Secretary of State under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, represented Wall Street and big business interests as an attorney – Hughes argued more than 50 cases before the Supreme Court – and might have been a presidential candidate again in 1928 had he not declined citing his age.

As more proof that the current Senate politics of rejection by inaction is truly unprecedented, consider Hughes’ return to the Supreme Court in 1930, as the nominee to become chief justice, appointed by the beleaguered President Herbert Hoover. With the catastrophic impacts of the Great Depression settling over the nation, Hoover appeared more and more like a one-term president, even two years before another election and his appointment of a partisan Republican, not to mention a big-time corporate lawyer like Hughes, was too much for a bipartisan group of Senate progressives. They determined to oppose Hughes, perhaps the most broadly qualified person ever appointed to the Court.

Still, there was no talk or apparently even any thought to not bringing Hughes’ nomination to a vote and certainly no hint that senators who opposed his appointment would filibuster. Instead the Senate did what the Constitution calls for – it offers advice and consent (or if it doesn’t like the nominee for whatever reason it withholds its consent).

Idaho Republican William E. Borah led the Senate opposition to Hughes. While admitting that Hughes was “a man of high standing” and a person “of wide reputation and acknowledge ability,” Borah said he was also an unreconstructed big business Republican whose views should not be made “a permanent part of our legal and economic system.”

Hughes: An Example of the Sweet Irony of Politics 

Hughes was confirmed and served with great distinction until 1941. When Franklin Roosevelt attempted to “pack” the Supreme Court in 1937, Hughes quietly and effectively made common cause with Borah and others who had once objected to his confirmation. Hughes’ role in those pivotal events, as well as his often progressive record on the Court is a prime example of the sweet irony or unintended consequences that can occasionally grace the grubby business of politics, and judicial appointments.

Benjamin Cardozo
Benjamin Cardozo

Herbert Hoover made another Court appointment in 1932, a decision made much closer to the election of 1932, which he subsequently lost to Roosevelt. That appointment, suggested by Borah – talk about advice as well as consent – was of Benjamin Cardozo, a brilliant legal mind who Hoover initially thought was too liberal to be considered. Borah convinced the president of Cardozo’s merits and he also turned out to be a great justice.

Politics can never – and perhaps should never – be completely removed from any president’s decision about any Supreme Court appointment, but for the process to work as the Founders envisioned everyone has to play their role, and play it responsibly. Obama has made a superlative choice in an awful time of political upheaval – a judge of proven ability, upmost integrity, not a political choice, but rather a nominee who would normally be seen as a moderate, consensus-demanding choice. In other words, just the kind of person we need on the Court, The Senate should rush to confirm him.

The political commentator Ezra Klein puts it more starkly. By edging ever closer to the nomination of Donald Trump and playing blatant partisan politics with the Supreme Court, the GOP has adopted a position “that they will refuse to confirm any nominee, no matter how qualified or appealing, until the next president is inaugurated. In practice, what this means is they are hoping to hold the Supreme Court vacancy so it can be filled by … President Donald Trump.”

Klein quotes the prescient observations of Congressional scholars Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann. “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics,” as they wrote in an important 2012 book. “It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

“When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”

Those who follow Mitch McConnell blindly into this dark partisan political thicket are playing with fire and one suspects many of them know that. They will live to rue the day they refused even to consider a demonstrably qualified and moderate appointment. They may think it can’t get worse. They would be wrong.

The November election will determine the shape of the Supreme Court for a generation or more. Mitch McConnell is betting the country on Donald Trump. Would you bet even a Starbucks latte that Trump has any clue about what a Supreme Court appointee ought to look like?

 

2016 Election, FDR, Trump

America’s Battles with Demagogues

 

     “With his victories yesterday, I believe it is now time for Republicans to accept and respect the will of the voters and coalesce behind Donald Trump.”

Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott.

——–

Two years into his first term and with the rosy bloom of the New Deal’s earliest days fading, Franklin Roosevelt faced attacks from the left and the right. Unemployment was still off the charts. Farmers continued to struggle. The elderly demanded economic security. Populists insisted on more from the president, including specifically more punitive action against Wall Street and the wealthy, while west coast longshoremen, motivated in part by radical leftists, closed down ports prompting an often-vicious police and military response.

Roosevelt: Battling his own demagogues
Roosevelt: Battling his own demagogues

A Louisiana showman named Huey Long was making noises about a direct challenge to Roosevelt – from the left. The great journalistic observer A.J. Leibling described Long as “a chubby man, he had ginger hair and tight skin that was the color of a sunburn coming on. It was an uneasy combination, like an orange tie on a pink shirt.”

Long’s other uneasy combination was a gift for moving audiences and devising clever and simple rhetoric, the kind of entertaining, divisive talk that attracts those looking for simple answers that are wrong. Reporters loved him even while acknowledging his excesses.

Father Charles Coughlin at the height of his powers
Father Charles Coughlin at the height of his powers

A Michigan Catholic priest’s rich Irish brogue mesmerized his millions of radio listeners every week with tales of how the economy and American society must be reformed in the interest of “social justice.” Father Charles Coughlin wanted to make America Great Again and eventually turned on Roosevelt and began calling the president’s program “the Jew Deal.”

A well-intentioned if misguided physician in California hatched a crackpot old age pension plan – The Townsend Plan – that virtually overnight attracted the support of millions of desperate elderly Americans. There was no Social Security, most states had no welfare programs, and the daily life for many, many Americans was beyond bleak. Dr. Francis Townsend’s pension plan was simple, understandable, economically crazy and had it been implemented might well have bankrupt the country. It was also widely popular. It took guts to oppose it and not many did, at least directly.

FDR Had It Easy…

For his part Roosevelt lamented that his presidency had been reduced to “fighting Communism, Huey Longism, Coughlinism, Townsendism…to save the capitalist system” from “crackpot ideas.”

Huey Long. The media loved him
Huey Long. The media loved him

In retrospect the great 32nd president had it easy. Within a few months of Roosevelt’s comment about what he was fighting against, Long was dead at the hand of an assassin and Coughlin was brought down by his own outrageous language, with his own bishop eventually ordering him off the radio. Townsend, always in over his head, continued to try and rally his followers, but FDR’s own Social Security program, approved by Congress in 1935, took any remaining breeze from his sails.

Through the looking glass of our time its tempting to view the 1930’s – the Great Depression, vast economic dislocation, the rise of totalitarian movements in Europe and elsewhere – as a fading anomaly, a one-off set of circumstances that America survived.

Yet, waking from yet another post-primary hangover to realize once again that a qualification deficient, serially lying, race baiting demagogue has taken another long step toward the nomination of a major political party and might – just might – con his way into the White House should remind us that our democracy is a fragile thing. We are only one chubby, ginger-haired, short-fingered vulgarian away from a much different and much more dangerous country. We have been there before and escaped the trap. Will we be so lucky again?

George Wallace on the campaign trail in 1968 --- Image by Bettmann/CORBIS
George Wallace on the campaign trail in 1968 — Image by Bettmann/CORBIS

Pundits struggle to find parallels to what confronts America. Is Donald Trump a latter day Barry Goldwater, a right wing, anti-civil rights libertarian who threatened to use nuclear weapons in Southeast Asia? Or is he a new George Wallace, a race baiting segregationist who actually won four southern states as an independent in 1968? All states, by the way, that Trump has won in primaries.

But the comparisons don’t do justice to Trump. Goldwater and Wallace had actually held office and they advocated real programs however misguided. Trump combines the worst of the earlier dangerous men, his rhetoric and indeed his demeanor are more toxic, his mastery of the tools of the authoritarian more absolute. He is truly in a special class.

I’ll return one day to analysis of why Donald J. Trump has risen so high based on so little in the way of intellect, preparation, temperament and judgment, but today the only question that remains is whether “real” Republicans; those not swept up by Trump’s grandiose, substance-free promises to build walls, deport millions and torture our enemies into submission, will disavow this truly dangerous demagogue? Trump, always able to climb one more rug higher on the ladder of outrage, now predicts – and in the process encourages – riots if he is denied the Republican nomination. That alone should be enough to scare frightened Republicans into action against him.

The Political Courage to Say “No” To a Charlatan…

Again, a historical parallel might be instructive. As Huey Long – even at his most outrageous, never as offensive or dangerous as Trump – rose in popularity in the early 1930’s, fellow southern Democrats were among his most outspoken critics. Powerful senators from Arkansas and Mississippi hated Long and did everything in their power to thwart his ambition. They took him on in Senate debate, worked with Roosevelt to limit his appeal and never would have supported him for the White House.

Contrast that with Senator John McCain in Arizona who faces a Tea Party challenge this year from his political right. McCain, the war hero kept captive in North Vietnam for five and a half years, was one of Trump’s first targets. The draft-deferred Trump – he reportedly had bone spurs in his heels, but has never fully explained his defermentdissed McCain as a loser for having his plane shot down and for being tortured in captivity. McCain finally roused himself to lamely lament Trump’s divisiveness, but would not reject the con man as his party’s nominee. Same with Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and near as can be known every other member of the Senate save Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, who has had the political courage to disown Trump.

The Man Who Would be President
The Man Who Would be President

McCain surely knows the principled and correct thing to do is to completely disavow the man who will soon head his party, but he’s unwilling to risk a backlash from the hard right who want to take him down at home. Undoubtedly, it’s a tough political position. Yet, why work so hard to go back to the Senate if you can’t muster the courage to stand and be counted by really opposing a dangerous charlatan like Trump? What’s the point of being a United States senator if you’re willing to accept the unacceptable?

It’s worth noting that when Trump was asked about McCain’s mild criticism the real estate developer told CBS News correspondent Major Garrett that McCain, “has to be very careful.” When pressed as to why, Trump threatened: “He’ll find out.” Sounds like the basis of a good, solid working relationship doesn’t it?

There will be a special place in political hell for the likes of Chris Christie and Ben Carson, the co-chairs of the Trump Opportunism Caucus. One suspects they endorsed the bloviator-in-chief after removing all the mirrors from their homes. After all, how could they possible face themselves while shaving?

All That’s Left is Refusing to Support Him…

Still, it is the collective political impotence of the Republican “elites” which will be one of the great artifacts of the 2016 election. They originally celebrated the depth of their dream team of candidates, raised vast sums for many of them and completely missed the rise of the vulgarian until they were powerless to deny him ownership by eminent domain of their party. The only thing they have left is the power of refusal, the power of one-by-one to say “I’ll not support him.” When all is said and done, when all the primary ballots are cast, who will stand up with Mitt Romney – so far he’s in lonesome company – and call his man a sham?

When Trump is standing before the Republican convention in Cleveland in a few months who will crowd into the picture with him? It will be the photo of the year,  maybe the image of the young century. Who other than Christie and Carson will share the stage with the genuine American demagogue and who will have the political courage and personal integrity to disavow the most dangerous man to get this close to real political power in anyone’s lifetime? Who among the Republican “elite” will have the courage to denounce, distance, disavow and in the end not vote for Trump?

It once was said in American politics that political power wasn’t worth holding unless you were prepared to lose it over a matter of high principle and conscience. One day our kids and grandkids may well ask, “What did you do to stop him?” That might just become a defining question of our time.

For Republicans, so long guilty of denying, abetting and even encouraging him, stopping Trump has come down to saying you cannot and will not vote for him.

 

2016 Election, Civil Rights, Trump

It’s the Racism, Stupid…

 

       “Well, just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke. okay? I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So, I don’t know.” 

Donald J. Trump pretending not to know “anything” about KKK leader David Duke

——–

The election results from Super Tuesday show conclusively that a serially lying egomaniac’s hostile takeover – or is it a leveraged lie-out – of the Republican Party is nearly complete. With an overtly racist appeal, Donald Trump has locked up the real base of the GOP – the “birther,” nativist element that, almost eight years on, completely and comfortably repudiates the nation’s first African-American president.

Hostage photo of latest Trump endorser
Hostage photo of latest Trump endorser

Amid all the bombast it is easy to forget how Trump kept himself in the national limelight before riding down his Trump Tower escalator into the heart of the Republican Party. Trump isn’t the original “birther,” but he made questions about Barack Obama’s birth certificate as much a part of his brand as the Trump-labeled suits that are made in Mexico. For months and months he was regularly featured on cable television, demanding that the president of the United States produce the proof that he wasn’t born in Kenya. Trump demanded it often enough that the idea became imbedded in the temporal lobe of a significant number of Americans.

Some of us might have concluded the whole thing was odd, or silly, or just Trump trolling for attention. What Trump was doing, however, is building the foundation for what his campaign has become – a race-based authoritarian hate parade that will likely take him to the nomination of a once great party.

The Founding Document
The Founding Document

Not all Republicans, and apparently not even a majority, buy the Trump-peddled nonsense about Barack Obama’s birth, or that the only Mexican interested in the United States is a rapist, or that the country ought to blacklist a billion or so of the world’s Muslims, but many of the Republican primary voters who are voting for the blowhard branding machine certainly do.

Not since the 1960’s, when Democrats largely repudiated their racist past and embraced civil rights, and the national Republican Party began to make calculated appeals to the sons and daughters of a segregated south, has there been a greater effort to divide the country by race than Trump’s campaign. Racial politics are as American as apple pie and as old as the Constitution and, while the guy who hesitated to disavow the Ku Klux Klan may be clueless about many things, he wields the racial wedge issue as skillfully as he handles his blow dryer. The evidence is both obvious and completely distressing.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the respected group that tracks the movement of the motley (and growing) collection of white supremacy hate groups, reports that those groups increased their activities dramatically in 2015. SPLC has a stunning graphic on its website detailing the prevalence of hate groups around the country. There is likely one near you.

KKK leader David Duke, the only man in the country Trump doesn't have an opinion about
KKK leader David Duke, the only man in the country Trump doesn’t have an opinion about

“After seeing the bloodshed that defined 2015, our politicians should have worked to defuse this anger and bring us together as a nation,” wrote Mark Potok, senior fellow at the SPLC and editor of the organization’s Intelligence Report. “Unfortunately, the carnage did little to dissuade some political figures from spouting incendiary rhetoric about minorities. In fact, they frequently exploited the anger and polarization across the country for political gain.” Let’s be clear; Mr. Potek wasn’t talking about Bernie Sanders or John Kasich.

It is also no accident that Trump’s biggest crowds are in the states of the Old Confederacy or that the first United States senator to endorse him represents Alabama. That senator, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, was once denied confirmation as a federal judge, at least in part, because former Justice Department colleagues testified that he frequently made racist comments and generally thought the Klan just wasn’t all that bad.

Failing to immediately disavow the support of David Duke, the white supremacy guru from Louisiana, should have been just another reason for a Trump disqualification, but, of course, it wasn’t. Beneath all the analysis that Trump’s appeal is really about rejecting political correctness or embracing an outsider is a cold and bitter reality. Trump could make his outsider case without resorting to demonizing by race, but that would not make his case complete. Make no mistake, stoking hatred based on race and fear is the heart and soul of Trump’s appeal and it’s working.

White supremacist groups made robocalls for Trump in Iowa and another group has a daily podcast devoted to Trump, while an admiring writer calls the candidate “our glorious leader.” Trump’s namesake, Donald Junior, is in the news today for granting an interview to a white supremacist radio show host in Memphis. When that decision was questioned, Trumpworld, of course, brushes off any suggestion of impropriety.

Channeling his inner Benito
Channeling his inner Benito

Trump, the first real Twitter candidate, uses social media to identify with a quote by Mussolini and disseminate bogus data about African-American murder rates. None of this can be an accident for a man obsessed with building his brand.

The Trump Republican Party is not just enamored by a gold-plated con man from Queens, but is committed to his politics of intolerance. Recent polling finds that significant numbers of Trump voters want to not just ban Muslims, but also gay and lesbians citizens. They believe white Americans are superior to everyone else and want to keep the Confederate flag flying. They aren’t sure – really this is true – that Lincoln was right in freeing slaves. The Trump Republican Party is truly the dark underside of America that has existed, unfortunately, since our Founders – the guys the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia celebrated as the font of all wisdom – decreed that black Americans were really just 3/5 of a person. (Look it up – it is in the “original” text of the Constitution.)

Some Republicans, perhaps for understandable reasons of self-preservation, want to stop this crazy SOB before he completely destroys their party, but others are willing to embrace the devil because, well, that’s what party loyalists do. But, actually, it’s not was loyal Americans do. Give a hat tip to Nebraska Republican Senator Ben Sasse, a very conservative Republican and a very new senator, who says to Trump – no thanks. Trump assaulted the very conservative Republican governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, who has had the gall to point out his obvious shortcomings. Haley also happens to be of Indian-American ancestry, so one wonders why Trump has dissed her?

Donald Trump is a habitual liar and a delusional self-promoter who has seized a fragile moment in the American experiment and tried to make it his own. He’s a nut job about most everything that matters, but he’s brilliant at exploiting fear and hate. He’s appealed to the sizable minority of Americans who have never accepted the 13th Amendment to the Constitution and salted in a few more fellow citizens who might never admit it in polite company, but happily rant anti-immigrant, anti-minority and fundamentally authoritarian sentiments (with Fox News playing in the background, of course) while taking out the trash.

William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan

It has become a parlor game in the political media to try and identify the historical figure from the past that most closely parallels Trump’s rise. The Harvard historian Niall Ferguson strangely suggests William Jennings Bryan, the prairie populist from the early 20th Century. But Bryan had a serious policy portfolio, was a serious fundamentalist Christian and actually got elected to Congress. Nor is Trump a new George Wallace, a southern white supremacist who never came close to winning nomination by a national political party. And Trump is no Barry Goldwater, a small government conservative who was wrong about civil rights in the 1960’s, but also no hater.

No, Trump is in a class all to himself. Never before in American history has a man so devoid of real experience, so lacking in temperament and policy, been so close to leveraging his own intolerance into a presidential nomination. Never before has a candidate gotten so far riding a platform purposely designed to divide the country.

It’s time – past time – to repudiate the fear and hate and racism, and most of all past time for more Republicans to do so. To paraphrase Madeleine Albright there is a special place in hell for the Chris Christies and the Jeff Sessions.

It’s one thing to lose an election. It’s quite another to lose the country.

 

2016 Election, Trump

The Day the Party Died

      “To the best of my knowledge, not too many Evangelicals come out of Cuba, okay? Just remember that.”

– Donald Trump questioning Ted Cruz’s Christian beliefs.

——-

If you are one who remembers important dates in history you might etch February 18, 2016 into your memory – as good a day as any to mourn the demise of the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Reagan.

On February 18 two things happened – seemingly unrelated, but really not – that could well define an otherwise indefinable political season: Donald Trump got into it with the Pope and was shown (again) to be lying. Each event should have been enough to halt the arc of the demagogue, but it didn’t happen and it won’t unless serious Republicans start taking this guy seriously.

The Nope and the Pope
The Nope and the Pope

Did any of us ever in our wildest, craziest political dreams expect the leading Republican candidate for president of the United States to shout down the Pope? Or put another way could we have imagined a political candidate behaving so outrageously that the Pope, who presumably has better things to do, felt compelled to condemn them?

Never. Not going to happen. But it did on February 18.

Pope Francis made a demonstratively accurate observation when asked about Trump. People who only advocate building walls and demonizing immigrants (or refugees) are not behaving in a Christian manner. Trump, a man utterly devoid of Christian principles and even more lacking in self-reflection or awareness, made the Pope’s critique not about the substance of what constitutes appropriate behavior, but about Trump being disrespected by the leader of the world’s Catholics. Amazing. Utterly amazing.

Trump, of course, then proceeded to win the evangelically dominated South Carolina Republican primary last Saturday, at least in part I suspect, because he got into a fight with the decent, inclusive, compassionate, highly educated Jesuit who just happens to be the Bishop of Rome. You can almost hear Trump channeling another famous authoritarian with an ego problem and asking, “How many divisions does the Pope have?” The Pope is a low energy loser, as we all know, compared to a guy who arrived at his own announcement riding an escalator.

Hours later during a made-for-cable TV event – I forget whether it was a town hall or a merely an excuse to sell commercials – Trump was confronted with incontrovertible evidence that he has been lying about having opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2002. The real estate developer cum reality television star has been saying for months that his brilliance about all things allowed him to see clearly and oppose the U.S. invasion. Trump doubled down on his Iraq critique in a recent debate – or was it an excuse to sell commercials – suggesting that George W. Bush “lied” about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in the interest of launching an invasion. The debate audience booed. His poll numbers solidified.

Turns out that Trump gave a radio interview in 2002 where he said, contrary to all the bluster about his prescience, that the war wasn’t really such a bad idea. In fact, he said he wished the United States had done things right and overthrown Saddam Hussein during the first Iraq war. Asked to explain the lie, Trump didn’t. “I really don’t even know what I mean, because that was a long time ago, and who knows what was in my head,” Trump told NBC.

Indeed, what is in that head now or a long time ago?

February 18, the day the grand old party died…

Trump owns the only part of the Republican Party that anyone (other than John Kasich) is appealing to – the angry, grievance wing. The real estate developer has used the political equivalent of eminent domain to appropriate the older, whiter, less educated, “working-class” voters who, near as I can tell, hate everything except the billionaire who stars in their own reality show. And, of course, Trump is a master at stoking and exploiting this group’s fears and hatred. In the 19th Century these voters were called the “no nothings” – anti-immigrant, anti-establishment and anti-Catholic, which may help explain Trump and Pope Francis come to think of it. But, above all they were angry. Their great, great grandchildren still are.

There are two broad approaches to politics: hope and fear. Trump has nailed down the fear factor.

The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein described Trump’s approach leading up to last week’s primary: “All week in South Carolina, Trump courted those working-class white voters by sharply raising the volume on his criticism of free trade and his warnings about the threat from Islamic terrorism. Both of those issues somewhat overshadowed his usual promises to both build a massive wall at the Mexican border and to deport the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants.”

There is so much to loath about the current state of American political discourse and the process seems increasingly absurd: Trump, Ted Cruz’s sleazy campaign tactics, Marco Rubio’s robotic performance, Hillary’s entitlement and problems with the truth. Even the most authentic guy in the race, Bernie Sanders, has so far displayed little ability to grow as a candidate. Sanders is good at repeating the same economic talking points, but hardly makes a pass at explaining how he might actually accomplish his vision, let alone pay for it. Neither party can find the will to really undertake the kind of serious, rational campaign America needs and most Americans want.

But set aside loathsome and deal with something more fundamental – basic common sense and honesty. Trump has no idea about how to govern and really makes no effort to display that he does. His appeal is entirely emotional. His policy is all bans, bluster and bravado. He would violate decades of international law by embracing torture – waterboarding and “much worse.” Even Dick Cheney was nuanced enough to claim what he sanctioned was “enhanced interrogation,” not torture. No nuance with Trump. The waterboarding riff is now the biggest applause line at his rallies.

Yet, remarkably, the most dangerous man to run for president in the modern era stands poised to skate to the nomination with the support of essentially the 35 percent of the Republican electorate who find his outsized ego and complete disregard for seriousness a tonic for their anger and their aversion to “political correctness.”

Jeb pulls the plug
Jeb pulls the plug

The three-way race is now Trump’s to blow and who will stop him? One absolutely bizarre feature of this absolutely bizarre campaign has been the unwillingness of virtually anyone, well save for the hapless Jeb Bush, to take on the bloviating billionaire.

As GOP strategist Stuart Stevens said recently, “It’s crazy that’s nobody else is trying to win except Trump. Rubio is not going after the person who is winning. I’ve never seen a campaign that seems as satisfied to not go after the leader.”

And there is this: a new analysis of campaign spending by super PAC’s shows only a tiny amount has been spent attacking Trump. As the New York Times reports, “In a presidential campaign during which ‘super PACs’ spent $215 million, just $9.2 million, or around 4 percent, was dedicated to attacking Mr. Trump, even as he dominated the polls for months.”

If Jeb’s candidacy illustrates nothing more, and his candidacy was extraordinarily vacuous, it shows that letting a bully push you around without responding doesn’t work any better on the playground than on the Republican debate stage. Only after Trump had, in the words of GOP wise man Steve Schmidt, “emasculated” Bush did the former Florida governor begin, sort of, to hit back. But there has been none of the frankly legitimate and necessary attack on Trump that goes after his often disgraceful business practices, his sexual boasts, his four bankruptcies, or a hundred other excesses. Everyone knows a bully is basically insecure, scared. Who has guts enough to scare our national bully?

Were is the call from any responsible Republican that Trump show us where the money went from his alleged fundraiser for veterans prior to the Iowa caucus? Remember he skipped a debate, said he raised millions and poof – nothing. And what about his tax returns? Mitt Romney was savaged for not releasing his four years ago, yet Trump’s vaunted success as a businessman, the details of which might be illuminated by a look at how he arranges his financial affairs, has received virtually no scrutiny.

The failure to truly confront this dangerous man is nothing short of political malpractice.

Rubio and Cruz, the last men standing able to confront the great dissembler, are deeply flawed candidates who have reduced their campaigns to a hard right-wing spat over who has been the purest in refusing to deal with the obvious need to reform immigration policy. Meanwhile, untroubled by cable television interviewers or even the more serious Sunday shows who routinely let him “phone in” his clap trap, Trump insults, lies and Tweets his way to the Republican nomination.

Mitch McConnell: No to any Court nominee, but not a word on Trump
Mitch McConnell: No to any Court nominee, but not a word on Trump

Mitch McConnell vows to stop any nominee Barack Obama appoints to the Supreme Court, not knowing who the president might appoint, but does he say anything about Trump not being a suitable nominee for his party? Of course not.

“Establishment” Republicans whistle by the graveyard of good taste and common sense when it comes to Trump. Stopping him has quietly morphed into quiet acknowledgment that Trump may just be the guy and, if so, why tick off “the base.”

The country has real problems – wage stagnation, vast income inequality, our incredible lingering legacy of racism, high costs of higher education, a disjointed foreign policy that promises more continuing war – but we’re obsessed with a guy who can’t remember what he said about the Iraq war and wants to punch a protester “in the face.

If I weren’t so depressed, I’d be distressed, or something. Like Trump, I guess I don’t really know what I mean. Maybe I just really worry for the country.

But, remember February 18, 2016. The day the party died.