“Mutually Assured Destruction”: How Nikki Haley Revealed The Danger Trump Poses To The GOP
More than a few conservatives were shocked when South Carolina governor Nikki Haley offered an extended critique of Donald Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric in her State of the Union response last night. Though she didn’t mention him by name, the next morning she didn’t shy away from saying that’s who she was talking about when she said things like, “No one who is willing to work hard, abide by our laws, and love our traditions should ever feel unwelcome in this country” and “Some people think that you have to be the loudest voice in the room to make a difference.”
Here was the Republican Party’s choice to rebut President Obama, taking the opportunity of this formal setting to criticize the Republican Party’s frontrunner for the presidential nomination.
There’s no question the party is divided along multiple fault lines. But hearing it from Haley, who is thought by many to be a future contender for vice president and maybe even president, brings up some interesting questions about what Republicans will do if Trump becomes their nominee, and how his candidacy affects the complex balancing act they’ve been trying to achieve on issues of race and representation.
Here’s how that balancing act works. On the one hand, most of the influential people in the GOP sincerely want the party to present a more diverse face to the electorate. When someone like Nikki Haley or South Carolina senator Tim Scott or Marco Rubio comes along, they couldn’t be more pleased. Here, they can say, we’re not just a white party — look at these dynamic young Republicans who are members of minority groups.
That comes with a caveat, which is that in order to be embraced and held up by the party, you have to be in agreement with the party’s entire agenda, particularly on issues that touch on race. The party needs minority validators, who can push back when Democrats say that their policies are discriminatory in effect or even racist in intent. It’s much more powerful to have a black Republican argue that the party’s efforts to make it harder for black people to vote are motivated solely by its deep and profound commitment to the integrity of the ballot, or to have an Hispanic Republican make the case for crackdowns on undocumented immigrants, than it is to have a white Republican make those same arguments.
Having a few of those validators may not be enough to bring large numbers of minority voters into the GOP. If nothing else, however, it can keep moderate white voters from feeling like voting Republican means you don’t believe in a diverse and modern America.
But then along comes Donald Trump. One of the things that makes Trump so different as a candidate is that he says things explicitly that other politicians only imply. When it comes to stirring up nativist fears, Trump is cheerfully unsubtle. Mexicans are rapists, we should keep out the Muslims out — whatever you might be thinking but wouldn’t want to say out loud, Trump will happily say for you. Trump doesn’t bother coding anything. It’s no accident that there’s now a white nationalist group making robocalls to Iowa voters in support of his candidacy. Trump strips away the veneer of principle Republicans try to place on policies that benefit only their kind of people.
So one of the dangers of having Trump as the party’s nominee isn’t just that he’s a repellent buffoon who’ll lose the election, though that’s true. It’s also that his naked nativism and outright bigotry discredits the party if it ends up choosing him. His appeal can’t just be explained away, even if Republicans may try to say that he only has the support he does because of economic anxiety, an argument that Brian Beutler has been mocking to great effect. That’s a problem for every Republican running in a district or state where their victory isn’t assured.
So it’ll be fascinating to see what other Republicans do if Trump becomes their nominee. It’s one thing for someone like Haley to criticize Trump now, when we’re still in the primaries and someone else might win. But it will be much harder to do in the general election. Most Republicans will feel they have no choice but to line up behind him and work to get him elected, since the alternative is four years of a Democratic presidency. But what about someone like Haley — an extremely conservative Republican, but also the daughter of immigrants who knows full well that her background is a big part of what makes other Republicans so interested in her future ambitions?
One possibility is that Republicans will give him nominal support, but not much more. With a few exceptions, he’ll have the endorsement of all the prominent politicians, but they’re not going to put too much effort into making sure he wins the White House, especially if it means putting themselves out as his surrogates, where they’ll have to answer for everything he’s said and wants to do.
After all, losing the White House again could actually be good for the party at the state and local level, as it has been during the Obama years. As long as they can get people to forget the Trump candidacy as soon as possible.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, January 13, 2016
“What Donald Trump Owes George Wallace”: Demagogue’s Ability To Tap Into Fear And Anger In American Politics
Donald J. Trump, reality television star and real estate mogul, is different in many ways from major political figures in our past. But there are striking similarities between Mr. Trump and George C. Wallace, the Deep South politician who ran for president each opportunity he got from 1964 through 1976. The connections between the two — their rhetoric and their ability to fire up crowds — give us a better sense of what Trumpism will mean once he is gone from the campaign stage. After all, political losers as well as winners can shape the future.
Mr. Trump started his business career with what he called a “small loan” of a million dollars from his father. Mr. Wallace, the son of a struggling South Alabama farmer, clawed his way to power with hard work and a political antenna always ahead of the next public opinion poll.
And despite his reputation as a belligerent speechmaker, the insecure Mr. Wallace privately sought to ingratiate himself with friends and foes alike. It’s hard to imagine the egotistic Mr. Trump beginning a call to a hostile newspaper editor by cheerfully explaining, as Mr. Wallace once did, “I just called up to kiss your ass some more.”
What both share is the demagogue’s instinctive ability to tap into the fear and anger that regularly erupts in American politics.
Mr. Wallace’s 1963 inaugural address as governor of Alabama (“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”) and his “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” that same year seemed to limit his role to that of a strictly regional figure, part of Dixie’s long tradition of racist politicians. His presidential candidacy in 1964 and surprising strength in Democratic primaries in Wisconsin, Indiana and Maryland did little to change that national image. In April 1967, when Mr. Wallace told a Syracuse, N.Y., audience that he had decided to run for president as a third-party candidate, the television networks ignored his announcement, as did most of the major newspapers.
But in 1968, against a backdrop of urban riots, a war in Vietnam that dragged on inconclusively, tumultuous antiwar demonstrations and the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, a fiery Mr. Wallace began to draw interest across the nation; by September the crowds at his rallies rivaled those for his two main opponents, Richard M. Nixon and Hubert H. Humphrey. Mindful of his reputation as a defender of segregation, the Alabama governor avoided explicitly racist language. He was a pioneer in the use of code words to attack African-Americans while seldom mentioning race, instead condemning “asinine” school busing, the “bloc vote” and the “thugs” from America’s inner cities who supposedly stalked the nation’s streets.
Uncertain of what to make of the political upstart, the nation’s print media initially played down their coverage of Mr. Wallace rather “like parents who refuse to look when their child is doing something naughty for fear it might encourage him to show off,” in the words of one British journalist.
As his poll numbers rose from single digits in the spring to more than 20 percent by the fall, it was no longer possible to ignore Mr. Wallace, and the major newsmagazines and largest newspapers attacked him with a barrage of thinly veiled invective: He was “simplistic”; he had not “one constructive proposal to offer a troubled nation”; he sought “political profit in fear and hate.” Attacks by the mainstream media only strengthened his support. As one of Mr. Wallace’s followers told a newspaper reporter, “I could care less what Time magazine thinks; I only use it once a day in the outhouse.”
The hypersensitive Mr. Trump obviously cares a lot more about Time’s opinion. When the magazine failed to choose him as its 2015 Person of the Year, he complained that, despite being “the big favorite,” Time had snubbed him in favor of Germany’s Angela Merkel, “who is ruining Germany!”
Hostility to the civil rights movement was only a part of Mr. Wallace’s rhetorical repertoire. He was a “populist” of sorts, defending good, hard-working (white) Christian Americans, but his enemies were not the economic bankers and monopolists of his 19th-century forebears. He had found new dragons to slay.
On paper his speeches were stunningly disconnected, at times incoherent. But videotapes of those 1968 rallies captured a performance. A wild energy seemed to flow back and forth between Mr. Wallace and his audience as he called out their mutual enemies: bearded hippies, pornographers, sophisticated intellectuals who mocked God, traitorous anti-Vietnam War protesters, welfare bums, cowardly politicians and “pointy-head college professors who can’t even park a bicycle straight.”
For the television networks the spectacle became irresistible, particularly since rallies often erupted into violent chair-throwing confrontations between Mr. Wallace’s supporters and angry demonstrators. Hunter S. Thompson understood that George Wallace’s followers were not interested in position papers on banking regulations or the pros and cons of thermal energy. Watching the Alabama governor perform was awe-inspiring to the gonzo journalist, who likened the rallies to a Janis Joplin concert “in which the bastard had somehow levitated himself and was hovering over us.”
Both George Wallace and Donald Trump are part of a long national history of scapegoating minorities: from the Irish, Catholics, Asians, Eastern European immigrants and Jews to Muslims and Latino immigrants. During times of insecurity, a sizable minority of Americans has been drawn to forceful figures who confidently promise the destruction of all enemies, real and imagined, allowing Americans to return to a past that never existed.
At the same time, the rejection of the euphemisms of polite political rhetoric is part of the great appeal of such figures. As one of Mr. Trump’s supporters at a Dallas rally told a Slate reporter: “I love that he’s talking in everybody else’s language. He’s not trying to be politically correct.”
That response is simply an update from one of Mr. Wallace’s 1968 followers: “George doesn’t give us some mealy-mouth ‘on the one hand and on the other’ spiel. He tells it like it is and if it offends some government bureaucrats and loudmouth civil rights agitators, so what? He’s standing up and fighting for real Americans.”
George Wallace was never going to be president; neither is Donald Trump. But their influence, even far from the White House, has an impact. The Alabama governor’s success in mobilizing white working-class voters forced other candidates — particularly Nixon — to adapt a housebroken version of his rhetoric and policies. Mr. Wallace may have begun his career as a New Deal Democrat, but the way he appealed to these predominantly Democratic voters by channeling their frustrations against the federal government did much to pave the way for Ronald Reagan’s more genial anti-government ideology.
It is more difficult to assess the long-term implications of a figure like Mr. Trump, whose “policies” seem even more incoherent than those of George Wallace. He, too, has learned how to exploit the deepest fears and hatreds of white Americans frightened about the present and despairing of the future.
Whether he is nominated by the Republican Party or simply disappears into the long line of discredited demagogues, he has already left his mark. Just listen to what some of his fellow Republican candidates are saying.
By: Dan T. Carter, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina; Opinion Pages, The New York Times, January 8, 2016
“This Should Be A ‘Have You No Decency’ Moment”: The Deafening Silence Of The GOP Contenders On Trump’s Ad
When Donald Trump first watched his new TV ad that began airing this week, he said, “Play it again. I love the feel of it.” I, too, had to play it again, not because I too loved the feel, but out of amazement that this is what the front runner for the Republican nomination had chosen to put in his first TV ad of the campaign.
Forget the usual introductory bio or soaring vision for America. The ad itself pieces together the most extreme, bigoted pieces of Donald Trump’s platform including banning all Muslims from entering the country and building a wall to keep out immigrants. Perhaps worse than the ad itself was the lack of any kind of reaction from the other GOP contenders for the nomination, their deafening silence speaking even louder than the ad.
The ad proclaims that banning Muslims from entering our country is the right way to keep Americans safe, and in video that turns out to be footage from Morocco, not Mexico, we’re warned that closing off the border with a wall is the only immigration reform we need.
This should be a “have you no decency?” moment, but sadly, we shouldn’t be surprised that no candidate has stood up to Trump’s ad in any meaningful way. They’re not speaking out because they are in lock step, following Trump’s lead.
Marco Rubio has proposed shutting down mosques in the United States. Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz believe we should only allow Christian — not Muslim — refugees from Syria. Ben Carson likened refugees to “rabid dogs.”
Of course, demeaning rhetoric and policies aren’t just limited to the anti-Muslim comments we’re hearing from the Republican candidates. Discussing immigration policy, Chris Christie compared immigrants to trackable FedEx packages. Jeb Bush compared President Obama’s executive actions that protect DREAMers from deportation to those of a “Latin American dictator.” Marco Rubio stated that we should “absolutely” have a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border; and he’s jumped on the Trump bandwagon of over-the-top rhetoric, insisting that President Obama has “deliberately weakened America.”
Silly us to expect that any candidate will call anything that Trump says or does “a bridge too far,” when it is a bridge they have already crossed themselves.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For the American Way, The Blog, The Huffington Post, January 6, 2016
“Paul ‘Rage’ LePage, Maine’s National Embarrassment”: GOP Governor Under Fire Following Racially Charged Comments
Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R), already facing possible impeachment in an abuse-of-power scandal, is no stranger to controversies involving race. Early on in his term, for example, the Republican governor got in a dispute with the Maine NAACP over his decision to skip events honoring Martin Luther King. In reference to the civil-rights group, LePage said, “Tell them to kiss my butt.”
Two years later, according to Republican attendees to a LePage gathering, the far-right governor complained that President Obama doesn’t emphasize his biracial heritage because the president “hates white people.” He later denied having made the comments.
This week, however, LePage went just a little further still. The Portland Press Herald reported on comments the governor made at a town-hall meeting on Wednesday night.
About 30 minutes into the meeting, which was rebroadcast Thursday night, LePage responded to a question about how he was tackling substance abuse in Maine. He began talking about how much of the heroin is coming into Maine from out-of-state drug dealers.
“These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty … these types of guys … they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home,” LePage told a large crowd. “Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road.”
By way of a defense, as Rachel noted on the show last night, the governor’s spokesperson said in a statement to reporters, “The governor is not making comments about race. Race is irrelevant.”
Look, I feel bad for anyone who has to defend Paul LePage’s rhetoric; it must be an unpleasant and incredibly difficult job.
But if the governor’s office expects to be taken seriously, pretending LePage wasn’t making comments about race only makes matters worse.
On camera, and in front of a large group of people, the governor said “D-Money” is coming into his state from elsewhere – Maine’s population is over 95% white – selling heroin, and impregnating “young, white” girls.
Are we really supposed to believe LePage’s unscripted comments had nothing to do with race?
The governor’s rhetoric, not surprisingly, generated national attention quite quickly, and last night, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign issued a statement condemning the remarks.
“Governor LePage’s comments tonight are not only offensive and hurtful but they try to cover up the very real epidemic of drug abuse facing people in his state and across the country,” Hillary for America’s Marlon Marshall said. “LePage’s racist rants sadly distract from efforts to address one of our nation’s most pressing problems…. Sadly, Governor LePage’s comments aren’t too dissimilar from the divisive, misleading and hateful rhetoric we’re seeing from Republicans across the country these days.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 8, 2015
“Glad You Finally Noticed”: Latinos Are The One Group That Was Onto Donald Trump From The Start
A few weeks ago, during an appearance on CNN, a journalist who works for a conservative website said what many other political observers have been thinking: “Donald Trump is just not funny anymore.”
That is the popular meme that has been circulating throughout the media and the chattering class of pundits, analysts, and anyone else with an opinion and a burning desire to share it. I’ve heard it multiple times in the last several weeks, this idea that the Republican frontrunner is no longer as amusing and entertaining as he was a few months ago but has morphed into something divisive, demagogic, and dangerous.
I don’t know what planet these folks live on. But you can be sure that, wherever it is, there are no Latinos on it.
There are however scores of Latinos in the United States who—because of Trump’s boorish knack for insulting Mexico and Mexican immigrants, literally from the moment that he leapt off the starting blocks and announced his candidacy on June 16 — would say that Trump was never much fun to begin with.
We sure didn’t take much joy from his nativist swipes at Jeb Bush for speaking Spanish on the campaign trail and crass insinuations that Bush is a moderate on immigration because his wife, Columba, was born in Mexico before coming to the United States legally and becoming a U.S. citizen. And while we would agree that the real estate mogul can be described as divisive, demagogic, and dangerous, many of us are wondering what took the rest of America so long to figure this out.
For much of the nation’s largest minority—the estimated 54 million people who make up the U.S. Latino population, less than 20 percent of whom have a favorable opinion of Trump, according to polls—the billionaire blowhard didn’t just become the GOP’s problem child overnight. The truth is that he has been that way since the moment he claimed, without a sliver of evidence to back it up, that Mexico was “sending” the United States its worst people—including rapists, murderers, and other criminals.
The media seem to have missed this part of the story. They know that Latinos don’t like Trump, but they don’t really understand just how deep this animosity goes or how long it is likely to last. They must think that Latinos will just eventually get over Trump’s tirades, which only illustrates how little they know about Latinos. When we hold grudges, we think in terms of centuries. So, in all likelihood, Latinos are going to be hating on Trump for a long time.
Let’s start at the beginning. For the first five months of his presidential bid, the real estate mogul was a novelty. This quality made him attractive to Republican primary voters and irresistible to a broadcast media that was starved for ratings and ad revenue. With the subtlety of an air strike, Trump said what was on his mind, without a filter, consultants, or handlers. He didn’t use focus groups or rely on polling before making major pronouncements or suggesting radical shifts in policy. He ripped into both political parties with equal enthusiasm, and called out opponents by name. If there is some unwritten code of professional courtesy that keeps politicians from telling us how they really feel about one another, The Donald didn’t get a copy. In just about every way you could imagine, he was refreshing and even—and dare we say it—fun.
In fact, as if to emphasize that point, the Huffington Post initially featured stories about Trump not in its “Politics” but in that portion of the site dedicated to “Entertainment.” It’s also worth noting that, with few exceptions, and with some early attempts to poke at Trump by repeating and amplifying some of his controversial remarks, the Fourth Estate has, for the most part, been on friendly terms with the presidential hopeful.
I remember the exact moment when this epiphany hit me. It was November 12, and while on the road for a speech I was watching CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront.” Trump was the guest, and the topic was immigration. The dialogue between host and guest was cordial, and Burnett—who was formerly a financial news reporter—kept referring to Trump by his first name. It was Donald this, and Donald that.
I have a tough time imaging Burnett or, for that matter, anyone else in the media casually referring to other 2016 presidential candidates as “Jeb” or “Hillary.”
Of course, Jeb and Hillary have proper honorific titles that Trump lacks, I know that. But how about going with: “Mr. Trump?” There’s a weird chumminess to it. For the New York media, much of their familiarity with Trump comes from the fact the real estate tycoon is, shall we say, “from the neighborhood.” His spectacular Manhattan penthouse atop Trump Tower is just a short limousine ride from some of the skyscrapers that house the major television networks.
Besides, it certainly didn’t hurt that—even for a Republican—Trump is considered by many to be a moderate on social issues. He also has a long history of contributing to and voting for Democratic candidates, including Hillary Clinton.
Whatever the reason, Trump spent the first five months of his presidential campaign gliding along on a magic carpet of friendly media coverage. He took care of the media, by being available at a moment’s notice when they called and by consistantly delivering high ratings. And the media took care of The Donald by giving him tens of millions dollars in earned media and handling him with kid gloves.
But then came the sixth month—December—when, after being atop dozens of polls for weeks on end, The Donald suddenly became less fun and more scary.
The tipping point came on the fateful day of Dec. 7. That’s when Trump shocked the country by calling for a temporary freeze on visas for Muslims seeking to enter the United States.
Just a few days earlier, a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, carried out by supporters of the Islamic State, had killed 14 people and wounded 22 others. Worried that elements of the U.S. Muslim community might be in cahoots with terrorists, Trump urged a moratorium on Muslims traveling to the United States until “our leaders figure out what the hell is going on.”
That’s a good question: What the hell is going on? Many Americans really want to know the answer to that question. And they agree with Trump that the Obama administration doesn’t have a clue about the enemy or how to fight it. And, in the absence of any serious and meaningful policy from the White House, Trump has filled the vacuum. In fact, according to the polls, a majority of people agree with the candidate’s proposed moratorium on Muslims getting visas. What sounds controversial to some strikes others as common sense.
But the media and the chattering class aren’t buying any of it. The proposal rubbed them the wrong way. They pounced on Trump immediately. Some insisted that he is a bigot. Others accused him of stoking fears and resorting to demagoguery in order to pick on people who don’t have a voice.
To which, Latinos can only wince and respond: “Gee, you don’t say?”
By: Ruben Navarrette, Jr., The Daily Beast, January 4, 2016
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