“Likening Himself To Billy Graham”: The Donald Trump Revival Comes To Alabama
As “Sweet Home Alabama” blared into the humid Alabama air on Friday night, Donald Trump waltzed up to the lectern like he was accepting an award at the unlikely campaign venue of Ladd-Peebles Stadium in Mobile, a city of 200,000, wearing a crisp, white button-down beneath a navy blazer and a red, “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” hat over his naturally luxurious hair.
He grasped the lectern with both hands, looking like he was trying to steer a ship in the sea of what were, according to his campaign, 30,000 Alabama residents but with all the empty seats appeared to be significantly fewer than that.
“Woooooow. Wow wow wow!” Trump bellowed like a baritone Sally Field. “Unbelievable! Unbelievaaaaable! Ugh, thank you. That’s so beautiful.”
Then, he said, “Now I know how the great Billy Graham felt, because it’s the same feeling.” Billy Graham, the conservative Christian evangelist and presidential spiritual adviser, got his start preaching outdoors on street corners, in front of bars, and in the parking lot of a dog racetrack. “We love Billy Graham,” Trump said. “We LOVE Billy Graham.” In 2013, Trump attended Graham’s 95th birthday in North Carolina, along with Rupert Murdoch, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin.
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released hours before Trump’s stop in Mobile, almost 32 percent of Republicans surveyed support Trump—Jeb Bush, his establishment rival, boasts the support of just 16 percent of the GOP.
Trump explained to the crowd that he needed to host his event in the partially-empty stadium because initially, when it was scheduled to take place in a hotel, they were only expecting between 250-300 people. But in case you haven’t been listening, Trump is a yooooge deal. When word got out about Trump’s event, according to Trump, the hotel called to say they couldn’t accommodate everyone. Next, Trump said, the campaign tried the Convention Center, but the size of Trump’s expected crowd grew so much that it surpassed the venue’s 10,000 person capacity. “So, we came here!” Trump exclaimed, throwing his arms out. “We came here.”
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump surmised that Trump chose Mobile because it “lies on the Gulf Coast” in close proximity to “other big population centers” like New Orleans and Tallahassee, and, less close but still not far, Birmingham and Atlanta.
Whatever his reason for being there, Trump sure seemed at home. He laughed and joked with the crowd. At one point, he walked around to the front of the podium, reached down into the audience, and plucked a copy of his book, The Art of the Deal from the hands of a female fan. Trump, ladykiller, called her “beautiful.” He said his book is his “second favorite book of all time,” and then asked the crowd what his first favorite book is. He seemed to smirk before he shouted, “THE BIBLE!!!”
This is Trump’s way of assuring Southern voters that he is, if not a man of God, at least someone who respects God’s branding—because for Trump to concede that anybody, divine or otherwise, produced a better product than he did, he has to think at least as highly of them as he thinks himself. And that’s as good as evangelicals are going to get from him.
At another point, Trump took his “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” hat off his head and ran his fingers through his hair, joking that he would prove to the skeptics that it’s real.
Later, a plane flew overhead, and he glanced up to the sky. Earlier in the day, a pro-Jeb Bush plane had flown by, with the message, “TRUMP 4 HIGHER TAXES. JEB 4 PREZ.”
“Huh, somebody stole my plane!” Trump smiled, “Dammit.”
Most candidates give more or less the same exact speech everywhere they go.
They tell the same heartfelt anecdotes and the same jokes with the same inflections to poor saps in state after state, county after county, day after day. But Trump, as he noted in Mobile (in a speech which lasted over an hour), is yoooge and popular and therefore every single time he speaks, it’s carried live on multiple television networks. So while he basically maintains his bullet points—immigrants are bad, America is getting beat by China, I’m really rich, Mexico is making America look bad, my military will be fabulous, did I mention I’m really rich—he rarely says the same thing twice.
Maybe it’s for that reason that Trump speeches never feel predictable, even though his biases are unwavering. He is a sputtering sprinkler of bigotry, flowery adjectives, and non sequiturs.
“Israel? I loooooooove Israel,” he said at one point while discussing foreign policy.
“We have dummies we have dummies we have dummies!” He complained of U.S. leaders.
His military, he said, will be “so big and so great” that “nobody’s gonna mess with us, folks—nobody.”
While he warned that “Mexico is the new China,” Trump informed his public that Nabisco, the creator of such beloved childhood snacks as Oreos, plans to move its factory there. “I LOVE OREOS,” Trump shouted. Then, sadly, “I’ll never eat them again.”
At his announcement speech June 16 at Trump Tower in New York, he said, plainly, “So, just to sum up, I would do various things very quickly.”
Friday in Mobile, he summed it up again, “I’m going to make this country bigger and smarter and better and you’re gonna love it! And you’re gonna love your president!“
By: OLivia Nuzzi, The Daily Beast, August 22, 2015
“Skeletal Descriptions Of Planlike Concepts”: How The Presidential Race Is Making The GOP’s Health Care Ideas Even Worse
Every major national Republican is sure that they want to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They are much less clear about what, if anything, they would do after stripping insurance from millions of people. Two plausible Republican nominees for president — Scott Walker and Marco Rubio — issued health care plans this week. And…let’s just say there’s a reason Republicans spend a lot more time on the “repeal” part of the “repeal and replace” equation.
Indeed, to call these positions “plans,” as opposed to gestures in the direction of having a policy alternative, is probably too generous. As Jon Chait of New York puts it, they are “not so much plans as skeletal descriptions of planlike concepts.” Still, even in larval form, Walker’s plan contains several elements that are common to most Republican health care proposals, and that if enacted would result in horribly unpopular policy disasters. Here are the main features:
End the individual mandate
Most individual components of the Affordable Care Act are popular; the requirement that people carry insurance or pay a tax penalty is not. And since the mandate was very nearly the lever that gave a conservative Supreme Court majority a pretext to declare the ACA unconstitutional, Republicans have also convinced themselves that it is one of the greatest threats to liberty ever seen. So it is inevitable that any Republican proposal will advocate eliminating it, as Walker’s does.
The problem is that the popular parts of the ACA can’t be divorced from the mandate. If people are permitted to free-ride, the health insurance market can’t work. Multiple states tried to initiate ACA-like reforms without a mandate, and it was a disaster — young and healthy people decline to buy insurance knowing they can get it if they fall sick, premiums increase, more people drop out, and the market collapses. This is why President Obama — who pandered during the 2008 primaries by putting forward a plan without a mandate — recanted as soon as he was in a position to actually try to get a law passed.
Make state regulations ineffective
Whenever conservatives have a policy they would prefer not to defend on the merits, the language of federalism comes in handy. In health care, virtually all Republican plans argue for permitting the purchase of insurance across state lines. Walker’s is no exception: “My plan would allow individuals to shop in any state to find health insurance that covers the services they need at a price that fits the family budget.”
In the abstract, a policy of permitting people to shop for insurance across state lines sounds attractive. In practice, it would be a regulatory race to the bottom. Insurance companies would gravitate to the states that place the fewest regulations on insurance industries. It would therefore become easier for insurance companies to deny claims, rescind insurance (or refuse to give it in the first place), and impose hidden costs. If you think credit card companies should be a model for health insurance companies, then Walker’s plan might sound like a good idea. If you’re thinking more clearly, it’s obviously a terrible one.
Make it easier to sell junk insurance
Walker’s plan would reduce federal regulations as well. The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that insurance actually cover things would be eliminated, as would other provisions such as the popular requirement that children be allowed to stay on their parents’ plan until age 26. Other provisions of the ACA, like the ban on discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, would be seriously weakened. So at the same time as Walker’s plan would effectively eliminate many state regulations, it would also leave the insurance companies mostly unsupervised by federal regulations as well.
Conservatives would defend this awful idea by posing a choice between “regulation” and “competition.” But the problem is that health care simply lacks the features of a competitive market. There’s a reason why other liberal democracies have more state intervention into health care than the United States, not less. And by the way, they all cover more people for significantly less money.
Attack the poor
Walker’s politics are not about small government. After all, he thinks that abortion should be illegal even when necessary to save a woman’s life, and he just approved a $250 million gift of taxpayer money to hedge fund billionaires to build a basketball stadium. Rather, his politics are about assisting the rich and powerful at the expense of the poorer and less powerful.
His health care plan is no exception. Like the ACA, Walker’s plan would offer tax credits to allow people to purchase insurance. But Walker’s tax credits would be distributed on the basis of age, not income. The result, as Jeffrey Young and Jon Cohn demonstrate, would be a disaster for the non-affluent, as insurance would become unaffordable for many people at any age. And in addition, Walker also advocates savage cuts to Medicaid. The callousness Walker showed in refusing the ACA’s Medicaid expansion in Wisconsin is reflected in his health care plans.
So Walker’s plan would be an utter disaster if implemented. But it’s not just about Walker. Amazingly, some conservative candidates and pundits attacked Walker’s plan from the right. A spokesman for also-ran candidate Bobby Jindal accused Walker of collaborating with Bernie Sanders to create a plan that would make health care far less accessible to the non-rich.
Essentially, Republicans look at the state of health care circa 2009 — in which more than 16 percent of Americans were uninsured, and in which insurance companies could abuse consumers in a number of ways — and argue that even fewer Americans should have insurance and the quality of the insurance should be much worse. This is one of the many reasons that the contemporary Republican Party is simply unfit to govern at the national level.
By: Scott Lemieux, The Week, August 21, 2015
“Some Americans Should Not Have Equal Rights?”: The Racist Roots Of The GOP’s Favorite New Immigration Plan
The year 1866 was an alarming one for xenophobes: Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, declaring “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power…to be citizens of the United States.” Though explicitly intended to grant citizenship to African-Americans, who’d been denied it by the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1857 Dred Scott case, wouldn’t the law also “have the effect of naturalizing the children of Chinese and Gypsies born in this country?” wondered Pennsylvania Senator Edgar Cowan. “Undoubtedly,” responded Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois. When President Andrew Johnson vetoed the act, he too raised the specter of the Chinese and “the people called Gypsies.”
Congress overrode the veto, and went on to enshrine the principle of birthright citizenship in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Needless to say, fears about the children of the gypsies proved unfounded. Yet the idea that people with certain types of parents should be denied citizenship—and the associated rights—persisted. Late in the nineteenth century the government tried to withhold citizenship from the children of Chinese immigrants, but was rebuffed by the Supreme Court. Native Americans weren’t considered citizens until 1924. These days the target is Latino immigrants and their children. And thanks to Donald Trump, the nativist argument against birthright citizenship has moved from a sideline item to a centerpiece in the Republican primary.
In a set of immigration policies released Sunday, Trump called for an end to birthright citizenship, which he described as “the biggest magnet for illegal immigration.” Trump’s invocation of the fictitious “anchor baby” phenomenon isn’t particularly original. But what’s striking is that his implausible call for reinterpreting or rescinding the 14th Amendment has been taken up by so many of his competitors in the Republican field, including Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, Ben Carson, and Rand Paul. Chris Christie said recently that birthright citizenship should be “reexamined.” The much shorter list of those not in favor includes John Kasich (who previously advocated for revoking birthright citizenship), Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio, who stated that he is “open to exploring ways of not allowing people who are coming here deliberately for that purpose to acquire citizenship.”
The issue of birthright citizenship resurfaces every so often in Congress, but it’s never gotten much traction. Most recently Louisiana Senator David Vitter warned of the “exploding phenomenon” of “birth tourism,” and in March proposed to limit citizenship to those who have at least one parent with a green card or who’ve served in the military. Though bids like Vitter’s are more demagogic than actionable, some US-born children with undocumented parents already face hurdles related to their citizenship rights. Texas, for instance, recently began refusing to issue birth certificates to parents who use a photo ID from the Mexican Consulate as their only form of identification.
Kelefa Sanneh points out that, bluster aside, Trump is actually forcing a substantive policy debate. The substance is extreme: Walker, for instance, once supported comprehensive reform legislation that including labor rights and a pathway to legal status; now he is “absolutely” in favor of ending birthright citizenship. (So are 63 percent of Republicans, according to a 2010 Fox News poll.) While the GOP was once wondering whether Romney’s promotion of “self deportation” went too far, now candidates are pandering to the base’s racial anxieties with talk of undoing what historian Eric Foner characterizes as one of the Republican Party’s own “historic achievements.”
The irony is that doing so would dramatically increase the number of undocumented people living in the United States. (As has the militarization of the border.) Denying birthright citizenship to children with undocumented parents would bring the population of unauthorized people to as many as 24 million by 2050, according to the Migration Policy Institute. The result, according to MPI, would be the creation of “an underclass of unauthorized immigrants who, through no fault of their own, would be forced to live in the margins of US society.” In other words, undermining the 14th Amendment won’t solve the (nonexistent) problem of “birth tourism.” It would, however, do what the denial of citizenship has done since the era of Dred Scott: strip civil rights from a racialized group, facilitating their exploitation.
By: Zoe Carpenter, The Nation, August 19, 2015
“The GOP Candidates Are Pledging To Undo The Iran Nuclear Deal; Don’t Buy It”: Get’s Us Nothing, And Potentially Costs Us A Great Deal
Republicans have spent much of the last six years shaking their fists in impotent protest against the things that Barack Obama has done. That’s the way it is when you’re out of power: There are only so many tools at your disposal to undo what the president does, even if you control Congress. This dynamic also explains some of the restiveness in the Republican electorate, since their leaders have been telling them of all the ways they’ll fight Obama (like repealing the Affordable Care Act), only to be stifled at every turn.
And now it looks like they’re going to fail to stop the deal the United States and five other world powers negotiated with Iran to restrain its nuclear program. Since the agreement isn’t a treaty, it doesn’t require ratification; instead, Congress can try to pass a resolution to stop it, which President Obama would veto. A veto override would require two-thirds of the members of both chambers of Congress, and the deal’s opponents aren’t going to get that.
While there are still a few Democratic senators who have not made their positions known, the last few days have seen one after another come out in favor of the deal (with the exception of New Jersey’s Bob Menendez, to no one’s surprise). Republicans need 13 senators to join them in opposition to the deal, and so far they have only two. As of this writing, there are 13 Democrats who have yet to announce their position; unless 11 of them come out in opposition — which seems all but impossible — the deal will have enough supporters to stop a veto override. Furthermore, such an override would probably fail in the House anyway.
So what will happen then? When all the votes are cast and the deal’s critics come up short, the Republicans running for president will rush to the microphones to repeat what they’ve already said: that this is the worst deal in diplomatic history, that Barack Obama is Neville Chamberlain, that Israel is all but already consumed in a fiery nuclear blast, etc.
If there’s been any disagreement between the candidates, it’s only in how fast they want to tear up the deal. For instance, Scott Walker says he’d do it on “day one” of his presidency, and even suggested he might launch a military strike on Iran to boot. Marco Rubio has said something similar, that he would “quickly reimpose sanctions,” which means tossing out the deal. Jeb Bush suggested that he’d at least hire his cabinet and check in with allies before figuring out what to do next, which is what passes for thoughtfulness in GOP circles these days.
What none of them have grappled with is what happens afterward. It’s possible that the other signatories to the agreement, including Germany, China, and Russia, will say that whatever President Trump thinks, they’ll hold up their end. If Iran agrees, then it might be subject to renewed U.S. sanctions, but the reason the current sanctions regime has been so effective is that the U.N. and so many other nations have participated in cutting Iran out of the world economy; sanctions by the U.S. alone would not have nearly the same impact.
On the other hand, if the agreement falls apart when we pull out — which is what Republicans would obviously prefer — then we return to the status quo, with Iran free to pursue nuclear weapons if it wishes without any inspections at all.
If the past is any indication, I don’t expect Republicans to find the time to discuss what would actually happen if they got their wish, since they’ll be too busy throwing Munich analogies around. But let’s assume that the deal doesn’t get shot down in Congress, and it begins to take effect. A year from now, what will the GOP nominee say about the deal? What if it seems to be working — the sanctions have begun to be unwound, inspections are proceeding, and there’s no indication yet that Iran is secretly trying to create nuclear weapons. What then? Will that nominee say, “I don’t care if it looks like it’s working, Bibi Netanyahu once showed me a picture of a cartoon bomb, so I’m still going to walk away from this agreement”?
Maybe. But the truth is that the next president abandoning this agreement has about as much likelihood of happening as Donald Trump’s plan to convince Mexico to pay for a 2000-mile wall between our two countries. It’s the kind of thing a candidate says when he wants to sound tough, but it’s not the kind of thing a president — even if it’s one of these guys — actually does. It would get us virtually nothing, and potentially cost us a great deal.
Think about that when you see the candidates shouting at the cameras after Congress fails to stop the agreement, pledging to do their utmost to destroy it.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, August 21, 2015
“Marco Rubio; Let Me Be Your Front Man, Republicans”: To Continue To Advocate The Fiscal And Regulatory Policies The GOP Craves
Today, Marco Rubio delivers a speech in Detroit, where he will again make the case to Republicans that the solution to their economic vulnerabilities lies in nominating Marco Rubio. “If I’m our nominee … We will be the party of the bartenders and the maids, of the people that clean our rooms and fix our cars,” Rubio promises. The choice of working-class occupations is hardly an accident — Rubio is describing the occupations held by his parents when they came to the United States. Rubio’s idea of a “party of” is quite literal — he means the party would be identified with the classes of the parents of its candidate rather than, say, its policies.
Many Republicans blame Mitt Romney’s defeat on his personal wealth, and there has been a renewed vogue for the always-popular appeal to personal working-class authenticity. Scott Walker has a story about buying a really cheap sweater. John Kasich is the son of a mailman. (National Review’s Kasich profile begins, “Have you heard that John Kasich’s dad was a mailman? If not, then you’ve probably never been around Ohio’s Republican governor.”) Hillary Clinton, too, reaches back to her mother to cast herself as the child of working-class toil. But Clinton grounds her appeal to hard-pressed Americans primarily in terms of her policy platform, which she has emphasized in a series of detailed speeches.
Rubio is unusually clear about his strategy to respond to Clinton’s arguments about policy with appeals to his background. “If I’m our nominee, how is Hillary Clinton gonna lecture me about living paycheck to paycheck?” he said at the first Republican debate. “I was raised paycheck to paycheck. How is she — how is she gonna lecture me — how is she gonna lecture me about student loans? I owed over $100,000 just four years ago.” This is Rubio’s plan. Clinton will attack the Republican economic program, and Rubio will talk about his life story.
Rubio’s platform is not entirely devoid of appeals to the working class. He emphasizes an expanded child-tax credit, which would provide benefits to families of modest means. George W. Bush, likewise, portrayed his tax cut as a plan aimed primarily at people like a low-income waitress mom, even though the overall impact was to make the tax code much more regressive. Rubio’s program would have the same effect, but more so. Even Rubio’s tax-cut plan, the most allegedly moderate aspect of his platform, would overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy. Other elements would compound the impact. Rubio would raise the Social Security retirement age, a change with little impact on white-collar workers, but a punishing blow to people who work on their feet or in some other physically demanding way. He would repeal Obamacare, whose benefits are heavily tilted toward low-income workers:
Rubio has sketched out a vague concept that would replace Obamacare, which — to the extent its effects can be defined — would shift much higher costs onto low-income workers, like bartenders and maids.
Rubio has voted for the Ryan budget, which would effect the largest upward redistribution of resources in American history. Indeed, he has set himself to Ryan’s right, criticizing the chairman’s compromise to slightly ease the impact of budget sequestration. He was also an early supporter of the 2013 government shutdown.
Rubio promises to repeal Dodd-Frank, a position that finds immense favor on Wall Street. Rubio may be the most forthrightly pro–Wall Street candidate in the race. His undiluted attack on Dodd-Frank prompted a grateful Richard Bove to write a column headlined “Thank You, Marco Rubio.” Bove is the author of Guardians of Prosperity: Why America Needs Big Banks. Some critics of Dodd-Frank favor (or like to position themselves as favoring) even more stringent regulation. Bove makes no such pretense. His book’s own summary begins, “Since the financial crisis, amid outrage at the likes of Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase and Washington’s rejiggering of the financial system, the banking industry has had one major defender: Richard X. Bove.”
It is positions like this — along with his past, retracted but perhaps still secretly held support for immigration reform — that have endeared Rubio to his party’s donor class. “At the American Enterprise Institute’s annual donor retreat in Sea Island, Ga., one attendee says Rubio got rave reviews from a crowd that included several billionaires,” reported National Review’s Eliana Johnson. “And in late January, the senator impressed the libertarian-leaning crowd at the Koch brothers’ donor conference in Palm Springs, Calif., and came out on top of an informal straw poll conducted there.”
In 2004, Democrats did not think they could frontally attack the Bush administration’s hawkish policies, so they wanted to use their candidate’s biography instead. That was the all-but-explicit message of John Kerry, who promised Democrats his military background would insulate him from attacks. Republicans who favor tax cuts for the rich, cuts in social benefits for working-class Americans, and deregulation of Wall Street face a similar dilemma. What these donors want is a candidate who will continue to advocate the fiscal and regulatory policies they crave, but can sell it to the public. Rubio is all but explicitly making the case for himself as the front man to make that sale.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, August 20, 2015
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