“Trump’s Brand Is Chaos”: Riots-R-Us, Straight Out Of The WWE “Wrestlemania” Playbook
It’s not for nothing that Donald J. Trump was inducted into the professional wrestling Hall of Fame in 2013. The billionaire braggart’s entire presidential campaign is straight out of the WWE “Wrestlemania” playbook—all preposterous boasts, racialized taunts and simulated mayhem that threatens to turn into the real thing. And wouldn’t TV news networks just love it?
Back last summer, when this column first took note of his uncanny impersonation of 1950s charismatic bleach-blonde bad guy Dr. Jerry Graham (“I have the body that men fear and women adore”) I was unaware of Trump’s enshrinement. Having outgrown pro-wrestling after eighth-grade, I’d never witnessed the 2007 “Battle of the Billionaires” between Trump and WWE impresario Vincent McMahon.
Anyway, if you want a laugh, Google the fool thing. Sure, it’s several minutes of your life you’ll never get back, but watching Trump posing, preening and throwing what a Rolling Stone reporter accurately characterized as “some of the worst punches in wrestling history” might wise you up to the game.
Alternatively, you could be a chump and show up at one of his campaign events to scream insults at some similarly deluded fool, or even get cold-cocked by a 78 year-old patriot and watch it being broadcast in an endless loop by CNN.
“I’d like to punch him in the face,” Trump said of a protestor at an earlier event, one of several similar incitements.
Yeah, well, the guy would probably survive.
For all The Donald’s penchant for sleeping with friends’ wives and bragging about it (Chapter 11, “The Art of the Deal”) I doubt he’s had much pugilistic experience. Very few guys with full-time butlers also have educated left-hooks. Surrounded by bodyguards most of his life, Trump appears to enjoy watching them bully people. But could things get out of hand as the campaign proceeds? Sure they could. This is the USA. Riots-R-Us. Scaring people into supporting a strongman is Trump’s only real hope of running this scam all the way to the White House.
“For the Manhattan billionaire,” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough commented in the Washington Post, “manufactured chaos is just as profitable for his brand as Paris Hilton’s sex tape was for hers.”
Never mind that Scarborough and “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski until quite recently fawned over Trump almost daily. He followed former Obama White House chief of staff (and son of Chicago Mayor-for-Life Richard J. Daley) in suggesting that the candidate scheduled a campaign event on the inner-city University of Illinois-Chicago campus precisely “for the purpose of provoking protests that would energize Trump’s own supporters.”
Let’s you and him fight. Worked perfectly too. Does it matter that the students who boasted of their ability to shut the Trump rally down are Bernie Sanders supporters? No, but it figures.
As Scarborough also correctly observed, they’re political naïfs who got played, giving Trump a fine opportunity to whine “on cable news channels about how his First Amendment rights were being violated. He was doing all of this while reaching a far larger audience than he could have ever done while actually speaking at a rally.”
Sanders would do well to emphasize to supporters his own reverence for free speech rights, which I do not doubt. Why give the bully a chance to play at being the REAL victim?
On his Esquire Politics blog, my man Charles P. Pierce addressed the issue with characteristic understatement: “let’s all stipulate that chanting for Bernie Sanders while you’re shutting down a Trump rally is just about as stupid a political move as there is.”
You want to protest? Fine. Pierce suggested setting up picket lines outside the arena. “Stop being played for such suckers. Stop enlisting yourself in his bloody vaudeville.”
Meanwhile, let’s remain calm, shall we? This is nothing close to 1968, that annus horribilis in American life. No Vietnam War, with its hundreds of conscripted dead every week. No cities in flames, and prayerfully nothing like the Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations that broke the nation’s heart.
A handful of hotheads at Trump rallies shouldn’t blind us to the fact, as President Obama recently pointed out, that the angriest people in America are those without a clue about what’s actually going on.
Asked if he bore responsibility for the nation’s “incredibly polarized political climate,” Obama was scathing.
“I have been blamed by Republicans for a lot of things,” he said “but being blamed for their primaries and who they’re selecting for their party is novel.”
“Think about it: if somebody told you seven years ago we’d have 4.9% unemployment, 20 million newly insured, gas is $1.80, deficits cut by three-quarters, marriage equality a reality, bin Laden out of the picture, Wall Street reform in place you wouldn’t have believed me….Imagine what Trump would say if he actually had a record like this—instead of selling steaks.”
And shadow-boxing with college kids.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, March 16, 2016
“I Have A Very Good Brain”: Trump’s Foreign Policy Sage Is Himself, Of Course
Hot off winning every state but Ohio last night, Donald Trump has taken his campaign of self-aggrandizement to the realm of international politics. According to Trump, there’s no one better suited to provide foreign policy insight than… himself.
Trump appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe earlier today. When asked who his foreign policy advisors were, Trump responded, “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.”
What any of that means to anyone is unclear. But does Trump have “a very good brain” when it comes to foreign policy? Does he have the wisdom necessary to make decisions whose consequences may take years to unfold? History says no: just look at Trump’s vacillation over the 2003 Iraq invasion.
One of the greatest foreign policy blunders ever committed by this country, the power vacuum left behind in Iraq — after George W. Bush dismantled the Iraqi army — aided in the rise of ISIS years later. Trump, who presents himself as a tough guy who would bring back torture to keep America safe, started off by claiming that he was against the invasion of Iraq. In a 2002 Howard Stern interview, he was asked directly if he supported the invasion. “Yeah, I guess so,” Trump responded. “I wish the first time it was done correctly.”
This was not a one-off case of supporting interventionist foreign policy. In his book The America We Deserve, he wrote, “We still don’t know what Iraq is up to or whether it has the material to build nuclear weapons. I’m no warmonger,” Trump wrote. “But the fact is, if we decide a strike against Iraq is necessary, it is madness not to carry the mission to its conclusion. When we don’t, we have the worst of all worlds: Iraq remains a threat, and now has more incentive than ever to attack us.”
In fact, in parroting the provocations of the Bush administration, Trump very much was a war-monger.
Fast forward to 2016, and Trump, in an effort to display his solid foreign policy insights, said during a Republican debate in Vermont, “I’m the only one up here, when the war of Iraq — in Iraq, I was the one that said, ‘Don’t go, don’t do it, you’re going to destabilize the Middle East.’” It was not the first time he claimed to be opposed to military intervention.
Even then, his commitment to non-intervention is political opportunism at best, given only 32 percent of registered voters still think the invasion was a good idea. He returned to espousing militaristic rhetoric during a campaign rally in which he promised to bomb ISIS — and the millions of civilians living under their rule — out of existence. “I would bomb the shit out of them,” said Trump during a rally in November. “I would just bomb those suckers, and that’s right, I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refineries, I’d blow up ever single inch, there would be nothing left.”
While Trump may think that he is the best at everything, from his relationship with “the blacks” to world-altering foreign policy calculations, his comfort with taking seemingly opposing positions should worry his supporters. But who are we kidding — it probably won’t.
By: Saif Alnuweiri, The National Memo, March 16, 2016
“From Reagan Democrat To Trump Republican”: It Is Way Beyond Time To Stop Calling These Voters “Reagan Democrats”
Heather Digby Parton took a look at some data from Alan I. Abramowitz, Ronald Rapoport, and Walter Stone about Trump supporters and reached a conclusion that has seemed obvious for a while now. Parton zeros in on the fact that these voters display an embrace of nativism, authoritarianism and economic populism. She adds nationalistic militarism to the list.
I guess I don’t really understand why this is such a mystery. This the profile of Republicans who used to be called Reagan Democrats. They’ve been part of the GOP coalition or more than 30 years. And their views have always been the same. Nativism/racism, authoritarian/lawandorder, nationalist/militarist, economic populists. These are blue collar white people who used to vote for Democrats until Democrats became the party of civil rights, civil liberties and anti-war protests. In other words, the party of black and brown people, gays, and feminists, globalists and critics of authoritarian police agencies and military adventurism.
After that happened Democrats remained more responsive to economic populism although they foolishly muddied their message so that their differences with the GOP were obscured. But it wouldn’t have mattered, not really. People who hold that set of beliefs are Republicans because they do not want to be in multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalition where “liberal peaceniks” and uppity feminists are equal partners. The GOP’s fundamental nativism and racism and “patriotic” militarism are the reasons they prefer the Republicans and they are the reasons they prefer Donald Trump. They love him so much because they’ve finally found someone who boldly expresses all those beliefs.
While Ronald Reagan made a direct appeal to these voters via finely-tuned dog whistles, the Republicans began wooing them to their party after passage of the civil rights laws of the 1960’s via their Southern Strategy. Because of that focus, it is tempting to assume that these voters all reside in the South. But as we’ve watched the rise of Donald Trump, it is obvious that they are also to be found in so-called “Rust Belt” states as well as the Mountain West.
Ever since the inception of the Southern Strategy, Democrats have been attempting to determine how they can entice these voters to return to their party. To the extent that their passions are ignited by Trump’s nativist, racist, sexist, militaristic appeal, it is safe to assume they aren’t coming back. That should have been clear from the fact that they were willing to remain Republican despite the fact that the GOP has never supported policies that address their economic populism. But if there were ever any doubts, it is now obvious what is driving their political leanings…it is nothing more than an appeal to tribalism.
It is way beyond time to stop calling these voters “Reagan Democrats.” To the extent that they now support Donald Trump, they make up what we often refer to as the “base” of the Republican Party – a base that has been catered to for so long that it is now threatening to take control away from people who still pine for the days when they were the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 14, 2016
“Another GOP Kamikaze Mission”: #NeverTrump Conservatives Are Fighting For Him To Reshape The Supreme Court
The organizing principle of the #NeverTrump movement isn’t simply that Republicans should deny Donald Trump their presidential nomination, as Marco Rubio has it, but that they should also deny him the presidency should he prevail in the primary.
Some conservatives’ implicit willingness to essentially throw the race for the White House should Trump become their party’s nominee has understandably raised questions about how thoroughgoing and enduring their opposition to him will prove to be. The other Republican candidates are still promising to support Trump in the general election, and presumably some stalwart-seeming #NeverTrumpers will fall into line as well.
Another, better reason to doubt that #NeverTrump is more than a strategic effort to defeat Trump in the primary—rather than in the general election—can be found in the Senate, where #NeverTrump sentiment is about to come into exquisite tension with the Republican Party’s determination to deny President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee a fair hearing.
The tactics #NeverTrump conservatives demand of Senate Republicans are of a piece with the reactionary maximalism that gave rise to the Trump phenomenon in the first place. The person who will determine whether this final act of resistance to Obama will hold together is Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, and thus controls whether Obama’s nominee will receive confirmation hearings, fair or otherwise. Grassley faces reelection this year and will likely be running against a formidable Democratic opponent. Obama is reportedly vetting Jane Kelly, an appellate court judge from Iowa whom Grassley has praised effusively in the past. So there’s a great deal of countervailing pressure on Grassley to break ranks from the rest of the GOP—including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who holds that the next president should get to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court.
How is Grassley responding to that pressure? By arguing in essence that not confirming Obama’s nominee is a compromise between liberal forces who want the seat filled according to custom and the forces of reaction that “come to my town meetings and say, ‘Why don’t you impeach those justices?’”
This is a microcosm of the Republican Party’s broader failure to cope with Obama’s presidency—which in turn gave rise to Trump, on whose behalf Grassley will apparently risk his Senate seat, fighting to hold the Supreme Court vacancy open for him. Confronted for seven years with wild-eyed derangement about all things Obama, Republicans have responded by indulging rather than disclaiming it.
Grassley was the most prominent senator to vouchsafe the lie that the Affordable Care Act would contain “death panels.” Four years later, Republicans shut down the government in a show of resistance to the law’s implementation. More recently, Republicans have gotten themselves wrapped around the axle by an anti-Planned Parenthood agitprop campaign, orchestrated by people who are now indicted for tampering with government records.
These episodes of ill-fated intransigence define the Obama-era GOP, and they’ve laid the predicate for Trump to take over the party by promising to be a better fighter. The storylines collide on Capitol Hill, where Republicans, who desperately want to stop Trump, are now effectively united behind the purpose of letting him shape the Supreme Court for a generation.
And just as with the Republicans’ previous kamikaze missions—the government shutdown, the campaign to defund Planned Parenthood—this instance of pandering to reactionaries will also fail spectacularly, when Trump loses the general election in a landslide, and Hillary Clinton fills the open Supreme Court seat with whomever she wants.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, March 14, 2016
“Must Be Defeated Through Democratic Means”: Donald Trump Poses An Unprecedented Threat To American Democracy
Last month, I made the case that a Donald Trump nomination would be better for America than the nomination of one of his Republican rivals. I no longer believe that. I began to change my mind when a report circulated highlighting his 1990 interview with Playboy in which he praised the brutality of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. This is not the first time I had seen Trump praise dictators. (He has effused over Vladimir Putin.) But Trump’s admiration for Putin seemed to spring from a more ordinary Republican partisan contempt for President Obama, and closely echoed pro-Putin comments made by fellow Republicans like Rudy Giuliani. Trump’s quarter-century-old endorsement of Chinese Communist Party repression went well beyond the familiar derangement of the modern GOP. This was not hatred of Obama, or some obnoxious drive to stick it to his supporters; it was evidence of an authentic and longstanding ideology. Trump has changed his mind about many things, but a through-line can be drawn from the comments Trump made and 1990 and the message of his campaign now: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”
My previous view of Trump was as a kind of vaccine. The Republican Party relies on the covert mobilization of racial resentment and nationalism. Trump, as I saw it, was bringing into the open that which had been intentionally submerged. It seemed like a containable dose of disease, too small to take over its host, but large enough to set off a counter-reaction of healthy blood cells. But the outbreak of violence this weekend suggests the disease may be spreading far wider than I believed, and infecting healthy elements of the body politic.
I remain convinced that Trump cannot win the presidency. But what I failed to account for was the possibility that his authoritarian style could degrade American politics even in defeat. There is a whiff in the air of the notion that the election will be settled in the streets — a poisonous idea that is unsafe in even the smallest doses.
Here is another factor I failed to predict. Trump, as I’ve noted, lies substantively within the modern Republican racial political tradition that seamlessly incorporates such things as the Willie Horton ads and the uncontroversial service of Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, who once called himself “David Duke without the baggage,” as House Majority Whip. But Trump’s amplification of white racial resentment matters. His campaign has dominated the national discourse. Millions of Americans who have never heard of Steve Scalise are seized with mortal terror of Trump, whose ubiquity in campaign coverage makes him seem larger and more unstoppable than he is. And terror is corrosive.
Marco Rubio, channeling the conservative movement’s response to Trump, has tried to connect him to President Obama, a figure who is Trump’s antithesis in every respect. Rubio has compared Trump’s rhetoric to “third-world strongmen,” an analogy he has in the past used to describe Obama (“It was rhetoric, I thought, that was more appropriate for some left-wing strong man than for the president of the United States.”) Rubio has fixated on the notion that Obama’s appeals to racial tolerance amount to an assault on white America, even condemning the president for speaking at a mosque. Speaking on Fox News Friday night, Rubio connected Obama’s style to the political correctness found on many college campuses and other left-wing outposts:
President Obama has spent the last eight years dividing Americans along haves and have-nots, along ethnic lines, racial lines, gender lines in order to win elections. I think this has gone to the next level here and you know, we’re seeing the consequences of it and that, in combination with the fact that, you know, I think there’s a need to remind people that the first amendment allows people to disagree with issues and say things you don’t agree with, which obviously is just being lost here. And then this sort of sense now on the left that if you don’t like what someone is saying, you have the right to just shut them down as you see happen on many college campuses across America and you saw tonight there in Chicago.
This is mostly laughable. Obama has condemned political correctness on several occasions, urging liberals not to try to prevent political opponents (even the most offensive ones) from making their case, but to win arguments with them instead.
But Rubio is not wrong to draw a connection between p.c. and elements of the left’s response to Trump. Donald Trump may or may not have been forthright about citing safety fears in cancelling his speech Friday night in Chicago, and disrupting the speech may or may not have been the protesters’ goal. But it is clear that protesters views the cancellation of the speech as a victory, breaking out in cheers of “We stopped Trump!”
Preventing speakers one finds offensive from delivering public remarks is commonplace on campuses. Indeed, more than 300 faculty members at the University of Illinois-Chicago signed a letter asking the University administration not to allow Trump to speak. I polled my Twitter followers whether they consider disrupting Trump’s speeches an acceptable response to his racism. Two-thirds replied that it is. Obviously, this is not a scientific poll, but it indicates a far broader acceptance than I expected.
Because Trump is so grotesque, and because he has violated liberal norms himself so repeatedly, the full horror of the goal of stopping Trump from campaigning (as opposed to merely counter-demonstrating against him) has not come across. But the whole premise of democracy is that rules need to be applied in every case without regard to the merit of the underlying cause to which it is attached. If you defend the morality of a tactic against Trump, then you should be prepared to defend its morality against any candidate. Now imagine that right-wing protesters had set out to disrupt Barack Obama’s speeches in 2008. If you’re not okay with that scenario, you should not be okay with protesters doing it to Trump.
Of course it is Trump who has let loose the wave of fear rippling out from the campaign. And it is Trump who has singled out African-Americans peacefully attending his speeches for mistreatment, and Trump who has glorified sucker-punching attacks on non-violent protesters. This is part of the effectiveness of authoritarian politics. The perception that Trump poses a threat to democracy legitimizes undemocratic responses — if you believe you are faced with the rise of an American Mussolini, why let liberal norms hold you back? The anti-Trumpian glory falls not upon the normal, boring practitioners of liberal politics — Hillary Clinton with her earnest speeches about universal pre-K and stronger financial regulation — but the street fighters who will muster against Trump the kind of response he appears to require. Just the other day, a man charged Trump as he spoke, and came disturbingly close to reaching him. More of this seems likely to follow, and it can spread from Trump’s rallies to those of other candidates.
A huge majority of the public finds Trump repellent. Some of his current unpopularity is the soft opposition of Republican voters who are currently listening to anti-Trump messaging from party sources and would return to the fold if he wins the nomination. But there is simply no evidence that the country that elected Barack Obama twice, and which is growing steadily more diverse, stands any likelihood of electing Trump. He can and must be defeated through democratic means. He is spreading poisons throughout the system that could linger beyond his defeat. Anybody who cares about the health of American democracy should hope for its end as swiftly as possible.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, March 13, 2016
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