“A Paradox In The Making”: For The GOP, Donald Trump May Be Evil Incarnate — Literally
What if a candidate for president were evil?
I’m not talking about the way “evil” is thrown around as an insult. I’m talking about real evil, the kind you find in the Bible. Chuckle if you must, but Donald Trump’s opponents are beginning to make the case that he is truly evil. And the deeper you look, the more you see that it’s no laughing matter.
The prevailing wisdom says Trump is riding high because the Republican base is raising a middle finger — once again — to the establishment. But the prevailing wisdom also says the base is dominated by Christian conservatives. That’s a paradox in the making.
Certainly, just because you’re Christian doesn’t mean you’re a wimp when it comes to politics. You can stand up and cheer, or grimly nod along, when someone — anyone — cuts through today’s tightly scripted Beltway blather with random rants and oh-no-he-didn‘t jabs.
But it’s becoming clear that Trump’s candidacy asks Christians to go much further than that — down the road of perdition, if Trump’s enemies are to be believed.
It all started when Trump went on record describing an attitude toward sin that would make the average churchgoer flinch. At the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, Frank Luntz asked Trump to share with the audience whether he’d ever asked God for forgiveness.
“I don’t think so,” said Trump. “I think if I do something wrong, I think, I just try and make it right. I don’t bring God into that picture. I don’t.”
He went on. “When I drink my little wine — which is about the only wine I drink — and have my little cracker, I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness, and I do that as often as possible because I feel cleansed. I think in terms of ‘let’s go on and let’s make it right.'”
Many Americans would probably hesitate to be so forthright about their view of communion. But Trump’s apparent honesty threw his insurgent campaign in a scary new light.
In secular America, one of the most broadly accepted ways to describe Trump is with swear words. People straining to be decent often resort to calling him an ass. But in Christian America, there’s another term of opprobrium that gets more to the heart of the matter. It’s not just that Trump’s campaign revolves around his harsh and ungenerous demeanor. It’s that he’s all about sowing discord. It’s what he does. It’s who he is.
And sowing discord, in the Christian imagination, isn’t just mean or nasty. It’s evil.
For Rick Perry — a man who might very well have to sit out the GOP primary debates while Trump hogs the mic — it’s time to call a spade a spade. He didn’t explicitly call Trump an evildoer at the Opportunity and Freedom PAC forum in Washington, D.C. But he came about as close as you can get.
“In times of trouble, there are two types of leaders,” he warned, “repairers of the breach and sowers of discord. The sower of discord foments agitation, thrives on division, scapegoats certain elements of society, and offers empty platitudes and promises.”
Readers of Dante will recall that, in the Inferno, a special slice of hell is reserved for the sowers of discord — schismatics who tried to advance themselves by dividing institutions. For these evildoers, Dante meted out the poetically just punishment of physical dismemberment. Just as they hacked apart the human bonds around them, so their bodies now were sliced and diced forever.
Readers of the Bible will remember that Dante wasn’t just freestyling. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, God “tempered the body” of Christendom together so that “there should be no schism” and “the members should have the same care for one another.”
Or as Perry put it, the sower of discord “offers a barking carnival act that can be best described as Trumpism: a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness, and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued.”
“Enter ye by the strait gate,” runs an early English translation of Matthew 7:13; “for the gate that leadeth to perdition is large, and the way is broad, and there be many that enter by it.”
Trump’s candidacy, Perry went on, “cannot be pacified or ignored, for it will destroy a set of principles that has lifted more people out of poverty than any force in the history of the civilized world — the cause of conservatism.” In sum? Trump’s evil ways tempt Republicans to turn away from their greatest moral purpose — a sin worthy of damnation.
Perry is the first to advance this argument so bluntly. But we can expect it to catch on, because Trump’s candidacy is forcing the base’s hand. If The Donald can keep up his numbers without a come-to-Jesus moment, that either means that the base has become a lot less religious, or that it’s so frustrated that it’s willing to cast aside the better angels of its nature.
Either of those developments promise Armageddon for Trump’s bedeviled rivals.
By: James Poulos, The Week, July 24, 2015
“Huckabee And His Multiple Holocausts”: Pretending To Believe Your Political Opponents Are The Heirs Of Hitler
I’ve been observing for a good long while now that the sunny, optimistic Mike Huckabee of the 2008 presidential campaign cycle is way long gone, replaced by an angry and paranoid culture warrior who thinks of himself as leading a revolt of Real Americans against the decadent coasts–you know, the Sarah Palin lane over there on the far Right of the bowling alley.
But the dude’s really outdoing himself at the moment, making a complicated diplomatic initiative as simple as a gas chamber during an interview with the Breitbartians:
This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history. It is so naive that he would trust the Iranians. By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven. This is the most idiotic thing, this Iran deal. It should be rejected by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and by the American people. I read the whole deal. We gave away the whole store. It’s got to be stopped.
Whoa!
Huck’s very proud of his solidarity with Israel, a country he’s visited many times. But this time his zeal for the people destined to kick off the End of Times earned him a rebuke from the Anti-Defamation League, which polices inappropriate Holocaust analogies that cheapen memories of the real thing.
So why would he Go There?
Political analyst Barack Obama had this to say all the way over in Ethiopia (per ABC’s Arlette Saenz):
On his first day in Ethiopia, President Obama waded into the 2016 presidential campaign, criticizing Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee for suggesting the president is trying to push Israelis to the “door of the oven” with Iran nuclear deal.
“The particular comments of Mr. Huckabee are I think part of just a general pattern we’ve seen … that would be considered ridiculous if it weren’t so sad,” the president said in a news conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
“Maybe this is just an effort to push Mr. Trump out of the headlines but it’s not the kind of leadership that’s needed for America right now,” the president added.
Alternatively, shouting about ovens is the sort of thing you’d expect from a candidate nervous about making the Fox News debate 10-candidate cutoff, which will be executed a week from tomorrow. At the moment, though, Huck is in a comfortable 5th place in the RCP polling averages. Maybe Huckabee’s trying to drown out and help shove off the stage some more endangered rivals for the Christian Right vote like Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry.
Or just maybe Huckabee really is an example of why the ADL needs to keep up its thankless task of warning pols away from Holocaust analogies. After all, Huck is a veteran of the Legalized Abortion Is a Holocaust meme, repeated most notably during his David Lane-faciliated tour of Europe and the Holy Land last year, designed to train conservative pastors and pols in how to emulate Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan in fighting the infernal forces of secularism and defending Greater Israel:
If you felt something incredibly powerful at Auschwitz and Birkenau over the 11 million killed worldwide and the 1.5 million killed on those grounds, cannot we feel something extraordinary about 55 million murdered in our own country in the wombs of their mothers?
So Huck sees Holocausts in every direction, all facilitated by the same Secular Socialist Evil Ones. And it’s a bit hard to stay off the hate train when you believe–or just pretend to believe–your political opponents are the heirs of Hitler.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, July 27, 2015
“Being A Jerk Is A Feature Of His Candidacy”: The Media Created Donald Trump — And Now He Can’t Be Stopped
Time for some straight talk: We in the media love Donald Trump.
Even when we’re criticizing him — and boy, has he gotten plenty of criticism from people in the media over the last few days — we still love him. There’s just something magical about the guy. I think it resides in the contrast between his transcendent boorishness and his unflagging insistence that everything about him is the height of class and sophistication. And the details — the spectacular comb-over, the downscale New York accent, the wife regularly turned in for a younger model — all combine to make him a truly glorious character, so easy to mock and yet so unfazed by the mockery of millions.
It’s hard to think of too many people who have sustained the kind of celebrity Trump has for as long as he has. After all, he first started appearing in newspapers and magazines in the 1980s. Nothing takes him down, not bankrupcy, not the failure of his political endeavors (remember how he was going to prove that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States?), nothing. He just keeps coming.
So while the Republican Party is hoping desperately that somehow Trump will just go away, he’s not going anywhere until he’s good and ready. And as long as he can turn on the news and see his face, he’s a happy man.
After he seemed to belittle John McCain’s status as a war hero over the weekend (“He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, I hate to tell you”), you could almost hear the collective whoops from GOP headquarters, not to mention from Trump’s primary opponents.
“There is no place in our party or our country for comments that disparage those who have served honorably,” said an RNC spokesman, which might be news to John Kerry, since disparaging his service was pretty much the centerpiece of the campaign against him in 2004. After weeks of trying not to say anything impolite about Trump lest they offend his supporters, the candidates finally mustered themselves to a round of condemnation.
It provided a perfect moment for the media, which is why this episode has gotten such enormous coverage. On one hand, it’s Trump, who’s always good for a story. And on the other hand, Trump could have been discovered to have a lab in his penthouse where puppies and kittens are tortured to make cologne from their tears, and it wouldn’t have offended journalists as much as an insult to John McCain.
There isn’t time to go into the details now, but suffice it to say that no politician in at least half a century has benefited from the kind of media adulation that John McCain has enjoyed, and his suffering as a POW is always presented as the justification for that worship. In striking contrast to the way they treat every other politician, McCain’s motives are assumed to be pure, his sins are excused, and his coverage focuses on his best moments rather than his flaws and mistakes. (Even his 2008 presidential campaign was reported with more gentle affection than most losing candidates get.) So even if the presidential candidates were not saying a word, McCain’s admirers in the media would be covering this story with all their might.
Which doesn’t make it much different from what’s been happening with Trump’s candidacy from the outset. As John Sides notes, Trump got much more coverage from his entry into the race than any other candidate, and the coverage sustained its high level even after that initial period. It’s interesting to contemplate whether Trump will still be news if and when he’s falling in the polls instead of rising, but chances are that before long he’ll say something else outrageous, which will lead to a new round of breathless coverage.
I suspect that Trump’s supporters aren’t going to desert him because he insulted John McCain — after all, McCain isn’t much liked among the Republican base, and this actually fits in with Trump’s political brand as the guy who tells it like it is. The fact that he’s getting universal condemnation could even convince the base that he’s exactly the kind of no-nonsense, shake-up-the-system candidate they’ve been hoping for. When he said Mexican immigrants were rapists and drug dealers, his support leaped among Republican primary voters, and they love the fact that he tosses around insults at anyone and everyone. And we in the media love it too.
Trump being a jerk is a feature of his candidacy, not a bug — and we just can’t get enough.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributing Writer, The Week, July 21, 2015
“The GOP Finally Finds The Courage To Attack Donald Trump”: You Can’t Shame Someone When They Had No Shame To Begin With
The GOP may finally have found the means to rid itself of that meddlesome real estate tycoon. And it’s fitting—and really, should have been predictable—that what is uniting Republicans against Donald Trump is his own big mouth. It’s one thing to call Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers—that caused some agita, but not enough to rid Trump’s GOP opponents of their visceral fear of alienating his supporters. But insulting John McCain’s war record? That’s something everyone can agree on, and thus gives the other candidates just the excuse they’ve been waiting for to bring out the knives for Trump.
On the off chance you haven’t heard, on Saturday, Trump said some interesting things about McCain, with whom he has had a little East Coast/Southwest beef of late. The setting was the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, where the candidates go to assure the evangelical voters who dominate the state’s Republican caucuses that they are loyal members of Team Jesus. At a presentation in which he was interviewed by pollster Frank Luntz, Trump essentially said that McCain is sort of a war hero, but maybe not really. “He’s a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said. “I like people that weren’t captured.”
That’s the part you’ve heard about. But the fuller picture shows that as silly as Trump’s assertion was, the really asinine thing in that exchange was the question. Trump and McCain have been arguing about a number of things, but most particularly, McCain said that Trump was succeeding because he “fired up the crazies,” and Trump responded by tweeting that McCain “should be defeated in the primaries. Graduated last in his class at Annapolis—dummy!” (the details of all this are explained here, if you care). Luntz said to Trump, “Referring to John McCain, a war hero, five and a half years as a POW, you call him a dummy. Is that appropriate in running for president?”
If you watch the video, you’ll see Trump give a rambling explanation of why he doesn’t like John McCain, saying nothing about his war record, and after a minute or so Luntz can’t take it anymore and blurts out, “He’s a war hero!” It’s only then that Trump says the part about McCain being captured. But what exactly was Luntz arguing here? That no one is allowed to say anything mean to John McCain because of what he went through almost half a century ago? McCain’s captivity was surely horrible, and he showed great courage in enduring it. But the guy has been a politician for more than 30 years. I’m pretty sure it ought to be okay to insult him.
The truth is that there are a whole lot of people in politics, both Democrats and Republicans, who share Donald Trump’s opinion that John McCain is a jerk. But if Frank Luntz was hoping to bait Trump into denying McCain’s heroism and create the moment that would bring Republicans together against him, he couldn’t have planned it any better. This particular comment, far more than all the other stupid or offensive things Trump has said just in the past couple of months, offered the perfect vehicle for them to attack—and without any of the risk that might come from sounding like you don’t hate immigrants. The reaction from everyone in the GOP was unanimous, and Rick Perry summed it up well: “His attack on veterans makes him unfit to be commander in chief of the forces and he should immediately withdraw from the race for president.” Don’t you wish.
The Republicans are getting ample help from the news media, whose adoring relationship with John McCain goes back two decades. McCain’s Vietnam experience is one of the foundations of that relationship—reporters have unlimited admiration for it, and express that admiration not only in endless retellings of McCain’s suffering, but in the comically false assertion, also endlessly repeated, that McCain is so noble and modest that he would never bring up Vietnam himself. (The truth is that McCain constantly brings up Vietnam to use to his political advantage, and always has, from his very first run for office. Which is his right to do, of course, but the rest of us should at least be honest about it.) So it isn’t only politicians rushing to McCain’s side of this spat; the news media are, too.
If there’s one thing Republicans know how to do, it’s bludgeon someone for showing insufficient respect for “the troops”; it just so happens that this is the rare case when it might be somewhat justified, even if their outrage is utterly opportunistic. Up until now, all the candidates knew they had to get rid of this guy, because he was making their party look both hateful and ridiculous. But they were too worried that if they attacked him, they’d alienate the voters drawn to his anti-immigrant rhetoric. Now they’ve got their chance to beat him down without much risk to themselves, and they aren’t going to pass it up.
If you’re an ordinary Republican primary voter today, you’re seeing every politician you respect condemning Donald Trump, and one might think that would inevitably have an impact on his standing in the primaries. But that may not necessarily be the case. Trump’s support, substantial though it may be, is limited—right now he’s leading the field, but five out of six primary voters are still supporting someone else. And all the evidence suggests that the people who are supporting him, conservative though they may be, are as angry at the party’s establishment as they are at immigrants and Barack Obama.
So it’s entirely possible that once the campaign moves on from the next micro-controversy in a few days, Trump’s standing won’t be too different from what it is now. One thing’s for sure: He won’t be pushed out of the race by the rest of the party. You can’t shame someone into submission when they had no shame to begin with.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, July 19, 2015
“A Strangely Desultory Campaign”: The Great Lost Huckabee Constituency
Something I was vaguely aware of but hadn’t really focused on came very much to my attention yesterday while we were taping this week’s WaMo BloggingheadsTV/podcast with guest Matt Cooper of Newsweek. Matt wrote a column that actually got Trump’s personal attention (leading to a brief interview) pointing out that The Donald’s hostility to “entitlement reform” and trade agreements along with his better known rhetoric on immigration had positioned him well to appeal to a distinct segment of Republican voters: non-college educated white voters, a.k.a. the white working class:
In the 2014 midterms, 64 percent of noncollege-educated white voters favored Republicans. “You are talking about people who are deeply alienated from American life, both culturally and economically,” says Ronald Brownstein, a political analyst who has written extensively on the subject.
These new blue-collar Republicans are more skeptical of free trade than the right’s traditional base is. And that’s created a major shift in the party. A Pew Research Center study in May found that Republicans, more than Democrats, believe free trade agreements cost them jobs, which bodes well for Trump since the leading Republican candidates largely support free-trade agreements. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz voted for fast-track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership—an essential step for ratifying the agreement—although on Tuesday, Cruz said he wouldn’t back fast-track, insisting he wanted, among other things, amendments that would limit immigration in future trade deals. And Jeb Bush and Scott Walker support it. Others oppose the deal, mainly due to the secrecy involved in the negotiations. But none are as vocally opposed as Trump.
His free trade position isn’t Trump’s only appeal to Republican voters; he’s also in line with most of the GOP’s base on entitlements. A majority of voters in both parties oppose reducing programs such as Medicare and Social Security. Not surprisingly, whites who haven’t gone to college tend to be adamantly opposed to slashing the safety net.
The flip side of all the talk about Democratic prospects to regain some of the white working class vote (see our most recent roundtable on the subject here at WaMo in conjunction with The Democratic Strategist, based on Stan Greenberg’s advice in the current issue of our magazine) is that this demographic has entered the Republican coalition without necessarily internalizing the economic views of GOP elites. So much as the “Reagan Democrats” represented a potentially rebellious segment of the Democratic coalition back in the day, today’s blue-collar Republicans are vulnerable not just to a “raid” from Democrats but from heretical Republicans who defect from party orthodoxy on hot-button issues like trade and entitlements. That’s probably an important part of Trump’s otherwise mysterious constituency.
But you know who was positioning himself to occupy this same ground? Mike Huckabee, as I observed back in May.
It will be interesting to see if he seeks and gains attention for being (most likely) the only candidate in a huge presidential field to take issue with the Republican congressional leadership’s push to win approval for Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. More importantly, the heavy, heavy investment of Republican politicians in budget schemes that depend on reductions in Social Security and Medicare spending will give Huckabee constant opportunities to tout his newly stated opposition to such cuts as a betrayal of promises made to middle-class workers who’ve been contributing payroll taxes their entire lives. Beyond that, two candidates — Chris Christie and Jeb Bush — are already on record favoring reductions in retirement benefits that go beyond the highly indirect voucher schemes associated with Paul Ryan.
Since then Huck has run a strangely desultory campaign, missing a lot of opportunities for earned media and making most of his noise competing with Bobby Jindal as to who can get most hysterical about imaginary threats to Christianity. He’s also showing his old incompetence in fundraising.
So Huck has languished in the polls even as Trump surged, and the final indignity had to be Trump getting all of the attention at an event–last weekend’s Family Leadership Summit in Iowa–that definitely should have been prime Huck Country.
I guess it’s possible that if Trump fades quickly Huckabee can batten on some of his supporters, though they seem to be a more secular crew than the God, Guns, Grits and Gravy folk. But more likely Huck will burnish his reputation for being a politician with more potential than performance.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, July 22, 2015
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