“Huge, Glitzy, Unembarrassed”: Trump’s Incoherence Veers Into The Danger Zone
Perhaps the laws of political gravity are about to take hold in the case of Donald Trump. But the lesson of this appalling primary season cautions against discounting Trump’s appeal — which prompts another Trump column, this one on the utter incoherence of his policy views.
It’s not simply that Trump is wrong on policy. Ted Cruz is wrong on policy. Trump is wrong on policy and argues for policy positions glaringly inconsistent with his asserted principles. All politicians do this, sure. But Trump’s incoherence is classically Trumpian — huge, glitzy, unembarrassed.
That phenomenon was on vivid display last week, as world leaders gathered for a summit on nuclear nonproliferation. On this topic, Trump stands, or says he does, with the global consensus. He raised the issue in his discussion with The Post’s editorial board, in response to a question about whether he believes in man-made climate change.
“The biggest risk to the world, to me . . . is nuclear weapons,” Trump said. “That is a disaster, and we don’t even know where the nuclear weapons are right now. . . . The biggest risk for this world and this country is nuclear weapons, the power of nuclear weapons.”
Okay, and — leaving aside the strange suggestion that authorities don’t know where the nukes are — give Trump credit for emphasizing the nuclear risk.
Except, jump ahead a few days, to Trump’s interview with the New York Times and his CNN town hall. Given Trump’s argument that the United States should withdraw military protections from Japan and South Korea, the Times’s David E. Sanger and Maggie Haberman asked: Should those countries be able to obtain their own nuclear weapons?
Trump’s answer managed to combine his concerns about proliferation with opening the door to more. “There’ll be a point at which we’re just not going to be able to do it anymore,” he said. “Now, does that mean nuclear? It could mean nuclear. It’s a very scary nuclear world. . . . At the same time, you know, we’re a country that doesn’t have money.”
So the United States can’t afford a nuclear deterrent? The cost of maintaining and modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal was $24 billion in 2015, and is expected to total about $350 billion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The cost of Trump’s proposed tax cuts is around $1 trillion — annually. I’m no billionaire, but that doesn’t seem like a smart balance of spending priorities.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper pushed Trump further on the conflict between his anti-proliferation stance and his willingness to allow more proliferation — during which Trump opened the door to a nuclear Saudi Arabia, closed it, and then cracked it open again.
Cooper: “So you have no problem with Japan and South Korea having . . . nuclear weapons.”
Trump: “At some point we have to say, you know what, we’re better off if Japan protects itself against this maniac in North Korea, we’re better off, frankly, if South Korea is going to start to protect itself . . .”
Cooper: “So if you said, Japan, yes, it’s fine, you get nuclear weapons, South Korea, you as well, and Saudi Arabia says we want them, too?”
Trump: “Can I be honest with you? It’s going to happen, anyway. . . . It’s only a question of time.”
This is a radical position, even contained to South Korea and Japan. “That would be an incredible catastrophe,” said Kingston Reif of the Arms Control Association. “We have a big enough problem with stability in that region without introducing two new nuclear weapons states.”
The cornerstone of U.S. nuclear policy for decades has been to prevent additional countries from acquiring nuclear capability. The more countries with nuclear weapons, the greater the risk of use, and of technology and material falling into the wrong hands. China would likely respond by increasing its nuclear arsenal. Other countries would lobby to go nuclear. U.S. influence in the region — on trade rules that Trump cares about, for example — would wane.
“No contender for the presidency of the United States in either party has ever said that since nuclear weapons were invented,” Michael Green of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who served on the National Security Council under George W. Bush and advised the Jeb Bush campaign, said of Trump’s view. “It would cost us enormously . . . in terms of the steps we’d have to take to defend ourselves against a much more weaponized world.”
There are other examples of Trumpian incoherence, but perhaps none so striking, and so dangerous if taken seriously.
By: Ruth Marcus, Columnist, The Washington Post, April 3, 2016
“Trump’s Many Racist Supporters”: Not All — But A Lot Of ’Em
In a Republican debate last month, Donald Trump was asked whether his claim that “Islam hates us” means all 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide hate the United States.
“I mean a lot of ’em,” Trump replied, as some in the crowd — Trump supporters, presumably — laughed and applauded.
That ugly moment comes to mind in describing how many of Trump’s supporters have racist motivations for backing him: Not all — but a lot of ’em.
Just as it’s unfair to paint all Trump backers as bigoted, it’s impossible to ignore a growing volume of public-opinion data showing that a large number of his supporters are indeed driven by racial animus.
A Pew Research Center national poll released Thursday found that 59 percent of registered voters nationwide think that an increasing number of people from different races, ethnic groups and nationalities makes the United States a better place to live; only 8 percent say this makes America worse. But among Trump backers, 39 percent say diversity improves America, while 42 percent say it makes no difference and 17 percent say it actually makes America worse. Supporters of GOP rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich were significantly more upbeat on diversity.
This was no anomaly. The week before, my Post colleagues Max Ehrenfreund and Scott Clement reported on a Post/ABC News poll that asked whether people thought it more of a problem that African Americans and Latinos are “losing out because of preferences for whites” or that whites are “losing out because of preferences for blacks and Hispanics.”
Trump had the support of 34 percent of Republican-leaning voters overall, but among those who said that whites are losing out, 43 percent supported Trump. Ehrenfreund and Clement did a further analysis finding that racial anxiety was at least as important as economic anxiety — the factor most commonly associated with Trump backers — in predicting support for Trump. Though the two factors were statistically close, those “who voiced concerns about white status appeared to be even more likely to support Trump than those who said they were struggling economically.”
Other somewhat-related attributes may be as or more predictive of whether somebody will support Trump: approval of deporting undocumented immigrants, strong feelings that the government is dysfunctional, and support for banning Muslims from entering the United States. (Authoritarian child-rearing attitudes, believed by some to be closely related to Trump support, were less predictive.)
But Clement, The Post’s polling manager, told me: “What was striking to me in analyzing the data is that even after controlling for a variety of demographics and attitudes [including all those above], believing whites are losing out continued to be a key predictor of Trump support. . . . Its importance persisted under a wide range of scenarios.”
This, in turn, confirms previous findings. Earlier this year, University of California at Irvine political scientist Michael Tesler, citing data from Rand Corp.’s Presidential Election Panel Survey, found that “Trump performs best among Americans who express more resentment toward African Americans and immigrants and who tend to evaluate whites more favorably than minority groups.”
Trump’s supporters overall tend to be older, disproportionately male, less likely to have a college degree and more likely to be suffering economically. But race is an ever-present factor among Trump supporters. Trump support, it has been shown, is high in areas where the number of racist search queries on Google is also high. The Post’s Jeff Guo has documented that Trump, in GOP primaries, performs best in areas where the middle-aged white death rate is highest — that he effectively channels “white suffering into political support.”
Various polling of more dubious methodology has found that Trump supporters are more likely to support the Confederate battle flag, oppose Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and support the Japanese internment camps of World War II. But Thursday’s poll by nonpartisan Pew, a well-respected outfit, finds antipathy toward minorities as well: Sixty-nine percent of Trump supporters say immigrants burden the country, and Trump supporters are significantly more likely than other Republican voters to want illegal immigrants deported, to favor a wall along the Mexican border and to support extra scrutiny of Muslims in the United States solely because of their religion.
Some Trump supporters may not be overt about (or even conscious of) racial motivations. One indication: Trump support is higher in automated or online polls than in surveys conducted by a live interviewer — about five percentage points, according to a study by the polling firm Morning Consult. One possible factor is a “social desirability bias” that leads them to tell an interviewer not what they believe but what they think is acceptable in society.
This may mean some Trump supporters feel a sense of shame — and that’s good. Trump makes bigots feel safe to come out of the shadows. But that doesn’t excuse them.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 31, 2016
“GOP Convention Rule 40(b)”: How An Obscure Rule Could Limit The GOP Convention To A Choice Of Trump Or Cruz
Back in the day, when national party conventions were largely autonomous events rather than infomercials for a nominee chosen in primaries and caucuses, you’d have many names, including multiple “favorite son” candidates who were not really running for president, placed in nomination, with extensive time spent on nominating speeches and even “spontaneous” floor demonstrations. As conventions became more tightly controlled and their managers worried about things like ensuring that the balloting and acceptance speeches occurred before East Coast television viewers were asleep, nonserious candidacies were sacrificed to efficiency. Among Republicans, the tradition developed that no one’s name could be placed in nomination without support from at least three delegations; that cut off the pure favorite-son candidacies. Beyond that, the status of conventions as ratifying rather than nominating events exerted its own pressure on “losers” who typically succumbed to the pressure to unite behind the nominee and grin for the cameras.
That was before the Ron Paul Revolution appeared on the scene. In 2012, the Paulites shrewdly focused on winning fights for delegates that occurred after primaries and caucuses in hopes of making their eccentric candidate and his eccentric causes a big nuisance at Mitt Romney’s convention. And so the Romney campaign and its many allies reacted — some would say overreacted — by using its muscle on the convention Rules Committee (meeting just prior to Tampa to draft procedures for the conclave) to change the presence-in-three-delegations threshold for having one’s name placed in nomination to this one:
Each candidate for nomination for President of the United States and Vice President of the United States shall demonstrate the support of a majority of the delegates from each of eight (8) or more states, severally, prior to the presentation of the name of that candidate for nomination.
This Rule 40(b), moreover, was interpreted to mean that no candidate who did not meet the threshold could have votes for the nomination recorded in her/his name.
Rule 40(b) succeeded in keeping the Paulites under wraps in Tampa, but as is generally the case, it remained in effect as a “temporary” rule for the next convention, subject to possible revision by a new Rules Committee meeting just prior to the 2016 gathering, and by the convention itself, which controls its own rules. In fact, its drafters may have intended to keep the rule in place to head off some annoying convention challenge to President Romney’s renomination.
Back in the real world, Rule 40(b) may have been in the back of some minds early in the 2016 cycle as a way to keep the convention from being rhetorically kidnapped by noisy supporters of Rand Paul, or of the novelty “birther” candidate Donald Trump.
Now, obviously, the shoe is on the other foot, and there is a growing possibility that the two strongest candidates for the GOP nomination, Trump and Ted Cruz, could join their considerable forces to insist on maintenance of Rule 40(b) or something much like it to prevent their common Republican Establishment enemies from exploiting a multi-ballot convention to place someone else at the top of the ticket.
Trump is currently the only candidate who is beyond the eight-state-majority threshold for competing for the nomination under the strict terms of Rule 40(b). But Team Cruz is confident enough that its candidate will also satisfy the rule that he’s the one out there arguing that Rule 40(b) means votes for John Kasich are an entire waste because they won’t be counted in Cleveland. And with both Trump and Cruz repeatedly claiming that the nomination of a dark horse who hasn’t competed during the primaries would be an insult to the GOP rank and file, maintaining Rule 40(b) is the obvious strategy to close off that possibility. A good indicator of the new situation is the evolving position of Virginia party activist and veteran Rules Committee member Morton Blackwell, a loud dissenter against Rule 40(b) before and after the 2012 convention, who now, as a Cruz supporter, is arguing that changing the rule “would be widely and correctly viewed as [an] outrageous power grab.”
But can the Republican Establishment stack the Rules Committee with party insiders determined to overturn Rule 40(b) and keep the party’s options wide open going into Cleveland? Not really. That committee is composed of two members elected by each state delegation. No likely combination of Kasich and Rubio delegates and “false-flag” delegates bound to Trump or Cruz but free to vote against their interests on procedural issues is likely to make up a majority of the Rules Committee, or of the convention. Indeed, most of the anecdotal evidence about “delegate-stealing” in the murky process of naming actual bodies to fill pledged seats at the convention shows Team Cruz, not some anti-Trump/anti-Cruz cabal, gaining ground. If Trump and Cruz stick together on this one point no matter how many insults they are exchanging as rivals, they almost certainly can shut the door on any truly “open” convention and force Republicans who intensely dislike both of them to choose their poison.
That would leave Kasich with his fistful of general-election polls and the proliferating list of fantasy “unity” candidates on the outside in Cleveland, playing to the cameras but having no real influence over the proceedings. And you can make the case that this is precisely what the Republican “base” wants and has brought to fruition through the nominating process. It would, of course, be highly ironic if the Republican Establishment’s Rule 40(b) became the instrument for two candidates generally hated by said Establishment to impose a duopoly on the party. But there’s no President Romney around to put a stop to it.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, March 31, 2016
“Learning From Obama”: Voters Have Lately Been Given A Taste Of What Really Bad Leaders Look Like
Like many political junkies, I’ve been spending far too much time looking at polls and trying to understand their implications. Can Donald Trump really win his party’s nomination? (Yes.) Can Bernie Sanders? (No.) But the primaries aren’t the only things being polled; we’re still getting updates on President Obama’s overall approval. And something striking has happened on that front.
At the end of 2015 Mr. Obama was still underwater, with significantly more Americans disapproving than approving. Since then, however, his approval has risen sharply while disapproval has plunged. He’s still only in modestly positive territory, but the net movement in polling averages has been about 11 percentage points, which is a lot.
What’s going on?
Well, one answer is that voters have lately been given a taste of what really bad leaders look like. But I’d like to think that the public is also starting to realize just how successful the Obama administration has been in addressing America’s problems. And there are lessons from that success for those willing to learn.
I know that it’s hard for many people on both sides to wrap their minds around the notion of Obama-as-success. On the left, those caught up in the enthusiasms of 2008 feel let down by the prosaic reality of governing in a deeply polarized political system. Meanwhile, conservative ideology predicts disaster from any attempt to tax the rich, help the less fortunate and rein in the excesses of the market; and what are you going to believe, the ideology or your own lying eyes?
But the successes are there for all to see.
Start with the economy. You might argue that presidents don’t have as much effect on economic performance as voters seem to imagine — especially presidents facing scorched-earth opposition from Congress for most of their time in office. But that misses the point: Republicans have spent the past seven years claiming incessantly that Mr. Obama’s policies are a “job killing” disaster, destroying business incentives, so it’s important news if the economy has performed well.
And it has: We’ve gained 10 million private-sector jobs since Mr. Obama took office, and unemployment is below 5 percent. True, there are still some areas of disappointment — low labor force participation, weak wage growth. But just imagine the boasting we’d be hearing if Mitt Romney occupied the White House.
Then there’s health reform, which has (don’t tell anyone) been meeting its goals.
Back in 2012, just after the Supreme Court made it possible for states to reject the Medicaid expansion, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that by now 89 percent of the nonelderly population would be covered; the actual number is 90 percent.
The details have been something of a surprise: fewer people than expected signing up on the exchanges, but fewer employers than expected dropping coverage, and more people signing up for Medicaid — which means, incidentally, that Obamacare is looking much more like a single-payer system than anyone seems to realize. But the point is that reform has indeed delivered the big improvements in coverage it promised, and has done so at lower cost than expected.
Then there’s financial reform, which the left considers toothless and the right considers destructive. In fact, while the big banks haven’t been broken up, excessive leverage — the real threat to financial stability — has been greatly reduced. And as for the economic effects, have I mentioned how well we’ve done on job creation?
Last but one hopes not least, the Obama administration has used executive authority to take steps on the environment that, if not canceled by a Republican president and upheld by future Supreme Courts, will amount to very significant action on climate change.
All in all, it’s quite a record. Assuming Democrats hold the presidency, Mr. Obama will emerge as a hugely consequential president — more than Reagan. And I’m sure Republicans will learn a lot from his achievements.
April fools!
Seriously, there is essentially no chance that conservatives, whose ideas haven’t changed in decades, will reconsider their dogma. But maybe progressives will be more open-minded.
The 2008 election didn’t bring the political transformation Obama enthusiasts expected, nor did it destroy the power of the vested interests: Wall Street, the medical-industrial complex and the fossil fuel lobby are all still out there, using their money to buy influence. But they have been pushed back in ways that have made American lives better and more secure.
The lesson of the Obama years, in other words, is that success doesn’t have to be complete to be very real. You say you want a revolution? Well, you can’t always get what you want — but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 1, 2016
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