“Why Is Trump Upset?”: It’s Because Cruz Is Schooling Him In The Art Of The Deal
Donald Trump prides himself on being able to bend arcane and unfair systems to his will.
Well, every system except one.
For years, Trump has been dogged by questions about his companies’ several bankruptcies, which are potential blemishes upon his business career.
In response, Trump has argued that there was nothing illegal, morally wrong or even shameful about restructuring debts and breaking contracts. On the contrary, these bankruptcies are a testament to his business acumen.
“I’ve used the laws of the country to my advantage,” he told Forbes.
“I have used the laws of this country just like the greatest people that you read about every day in business have used the laws of this country, the chapter laws, to do a great job for my company, for myself, for my employees, for my family, et cetera,” he echoed at the first Republican presidential debate.
And on Twitter, he argued, “Out of hundreds of deals & transactions, I have used the bankruptcy laws a few times to make deals better. Nothing personal, just business.”
He’s exercised similar rhetoric when talking about how he’s benefited from another controversial use of the law: eminent domain.
Governmental seizure of property for private commercial development, he argues, is not only good for the public and (allegedly) for the people forced out of their homes. It’s also used all the time by other prominent entrepreneurs and businesspeople, including members of the Bush family. So why not take advantage of this ripe system for himself?
Likewise, when asked why he’s donated money in the past to ideologically problematic politicians (including Hillary Clinton), he offers the same rationale: This is how the system works when you’re in business. It may not be fair or transparent, but a businessperson would be foolish not use it to his advantage.
“Maybe it’s a good system and maybe it’s not a good system, but it’s the system in which I was under and I thrived,” he boasted on “The O’Reilly Factor.”
In Trump’s world, exploiting the nation’s byzantine bankruptcy laws, or its bizarre eminent domain laws, or its opaque campaign finance rules, or any other system-rigging tools freely available to entrepreneurial types is proof not of shadiness but shrewdness — of his unwillingness to play the chump.
Which is why it’s so odd when Trump whines about Cruz behaving the exact same way.
Cruz has been quietly wooing delegates to the upcoming Republican convention, as well as the local party leaders who help select those delegates. He and his staff have traveled around California, Colorado, Arkansas, South Carolina and other states to help put sympathetic delegates in place in preparation for the possibility of a freewheeling contested election.
The upshot is, according to a Post analysis, that Cruz may already have effectively blocked Trump from the nomination should Trump prove unable to secure a majority of delegates on the first ballot.
As my colleague Marc Thiessen observed this week, Cruz is taking advantage of the peculiar, convoluted delegate system just as adeptly, and just as amorally, as Trump has taken advantage of the nation’s peculiar, convoluted bankruptcy laws.
Trump does not appear to appreciate the parallels. Instead, upon realizing Cruz’s behind-the-scenes efforts, Trump has gone apoplectic.
Having built his campaign on Twitter and free-media coverage, failed to invest much in a ground game and taken little interest until recently in how the delegate system works, Trump now indicts both a “totally unfair” system and Lyin’ Ted himself.
“It’s a rigged, disgusting dirty system,” Trump complained of a primary system whose rules have been available to him for many months.
“He’s trying to steal things because that’s the way Ted works,” Trump carped about a competitor who is cutting deals that the great dealmaker himself should envy.
There are two lessons to be gleaned from Trump’s selectively righteous indignation about unfair systems and those who exploit them.
One is that he’s a hypocrite. Obvious enough.
The other is that the main premise of his campaign — that his wiliness in the business world will translate to wiliness in politics and policy — is bunk.
Trump boasts that his whole life he’s been “greedy, greedy, greedy,” that his greed has paid off in the private sector, and that ergo he’ll be effective at being “greedy for the United States” in all its affairs. But if he can’t even figure out how to manage a primary campaign — let alone get his own children registered to vote for him — the chances that he’ll be able to seamlessly convert his monetary greed into political greed look slim.
By: Catherine Rampell, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 14, 2016
“White Evangelical Voters Are A Fickle Lot”: Giving The “Gays, Guns, And God” Bloc Reason To Stay Home In 2016
For the 2004 presidential election, political strategist Karl Rove resolved to avoid a too-close-to-call repeat of the 2000 contest. He believed as many as 4 million white evangelical voters failed to show up in the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Four years later, President Bush was enjoying high approval ratings as a “war president,” but Rove wasn’t taking any chances. He set out to inflame conservative fear with a campaign strategy built on a theme of “Gays, Guns, and God.”
White evangelical voters are a fickle lot. They don’t support just any Republican. They need to be courted. Wined and dined, you might say. John McCain, who never cared for social conservatives or their penchant for governmental control over private behavior, saw 2 million fewer white evangelical votes than President Bush did four years prior. Even more stayed home in 2012.
In launching his 2016 campaign at Liberty University, Ted Cruz was making clear his intention to be the Republican candidate of the “gays, guns, and God” bloc. But, according to Bloomberg Politics‘ Dave Weigel and Ben Brody, the Texas senator is aiming higher than Rove did. Cruz, they said, is banking on the theory “that 8 million to 9 million white evangelical voters haven’t been turning out. As many as 35 million of their peers had, but if the exit polls were right, enough evangelicals stayed home to lose states like Ohio and Florida” in 2008 and 2012.
So Cruz cut to the chase in Lynchburg: “Roughly half of born-again Christians aren’t voting. They’re staying home. Imagine, instead, millions of people of faith all across America coming out to the polls and voting our values.”
It’s a gamble, as presidential politics tends to be. But his odds are made longer by two factors. One is obvious. Cruz is hoping to double the “gays, guns, and God” bloc — 4 million more than Rove got. The other reason is more complicated, and it has nothing to do with immigration.
Immigration, liberal commentators pointed out within hours of Cruz’s announcement, was a serious concern among white evangelicals. Indeed, immigration may be a wedge issue facing the entire GOP presidential field. In Cruz’s case, he has sounded a jeremiad against “amnesty” since he took office in 2010, but most evangelicals favor, on moral grounds, a path toward citizenship. In other words, Cruz’s position on immigration is stark, while the position of the constituency he is courting is nuanced.
It’s interesting, this search for a wedge issue among Republicans vis-à-vis immigration, but it’s doomed. White evangelical voters don’t vote for things; they vote against them. And they vote against things by voting for the man who’s against them. Cruz does indeed oppose immigration reform — he pulls at the nativist’s heart strings — but that’s not going to deter the “gays, guns, and God” bloc. What deters such voters is a Republican Party insufficiently committed to annihilating gay marriage.
Here, I think, are the makings of a wedge issue. Gay marriage may be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court for a constitutional resolution, but it has been settled socially and culturally, according to public opinion polls. The difference is that we are now seeing that resolution’s political effects. Recent bids by legislatures in Indiana and Arkansas to permit discrimination in the guise of religious liberty were met with vehement resistance, not from liberal activists so much as the Republican Party’s largest and most powerful wing: business. To be anti-gay is now to be anti-business. If Ted Cruz is smart — and he is — he won’t give the business establishment reason to worry.
From the point of view of someone who genuinely believes that homosexuals, in seeking the blessings of marriage, are defying the will of God, this is infuriating. If the Republicans don’t defend “American values,” who will? GOP candidates are clever enough to find ways of dodging the issue. They’ll say they are personally against it, but defer to the will of the people. They’ll say it’s a matter for the states to decide. These are unsatisfying answers, because they don’t reflect the paranoid authoritarian tendencies of white evangelicals.
To be sure, Republicans like Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal are defying the business establishment. In an op-ed on Thursday’s New York Times, he said: “As the fight for religious liberty moves to Louisiana, I have a clear message for any corporation that contemplates bullying our state: Save your breath.” You might say he’s pandering to white evangelicals, and you’d be right, but that’s not all. Jindal is probably running for vice president. After Indiana and Arkansas, it’s clear the business establishment does not want an anti-gay plank on the GOP’s 2016 platform. But if the nominee can’t openly defend “American values,” at least Jindal can.
Even so, that ticket — in which the presidential nominee appeases the business wing while the vice presidential nominee appeases white evangelicals — is vulnerable to attack. The Democratic Party’s operatives might consider exploiting it. White evangelical voters are fickle for a reason: they are absolutists. A qualified stand against “the encroaching secular theocracy” is the same thing as surrendering to secularization, which is inconceivable to them. In light of debacles in Indiana and Arkansas, the Democrats can now sow the seeds of doubt: The business wing runs the GOP, so the GOP opposes “religious freedom.” With no where else to go, that might be enough for the “gays, guns, and God” bloc to stay home in 2016.
By: John Stoehr, Managing Editor of The Washington Spectator; The National Memo, April 25, 2015
“Change Your Stand, Or Shut Your Mouth”: ‘The Culture War’ — A Battle The GOP Can’t Win
The argument is over and conservatives have lost. Some of them just don’t know it yet.
That’s the takeaway from the remarkable events of last week wherein the states of Indiana and Arkansas executed high-speed U-turns — we’re talking skid marks on the tarmac — on the subject of marriage equality. Legislatures in both states, you will recall, had passed so-called “religious freedom” laws designed to allow businesses to refuse service to same-sex couples. In Indiana, the governor had already signed the bill and was happily dissembling about the discriminatory nature and intent of the new law.
Then reality landed like the Marines at Guadalcanal.
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence made a fool of himself on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” five times refusing to answer a simple yes or no question about whether the bill would protect a business that refused to serve gay people. Angie’s List, which is headquartered in the state, delayed a planned expansion. NASCAR, the NCAA, the NFL, the NBA, the WNBA, and a host of businesses condemned the law. Conventions pulled out and some states and cities even banned government-funded travel to Indiana.
Down in Arkansas, where similar legislation awaited his signature, Gov. Asa Hutchinson was no doubt watching with interest as Pence was metaphorically shot full of holes. Then he received a tap on the shoulder from a very heavy hand. Walmart, the largest retailer on Earth, born and headquartered in Arkansas, urged a veto, saying the bill “does not reflect the values we proudly uphold.”
Both governors promptly got, ahem, religion. Hutchinson sent the measure back to legislators for revision. Pence signed a measure to “fix” a law whose glories he had spent so much time touting.
And here, a little context might be instructive. Twenty years ago, you recall, we were essentially arguing over the right of gay people to exist. The debate then was over whether they could serve in the military, adopt children, be fired or denied housing because of their sexuality, Ten years ago, public opinion on most of those issues having swung decisively, we were fighting over whether or not they could get married. Ten years later, that point pretty much conceded, we are arguing over who should bake the cake.
The very parameters of the debate have shifted dramatically to the dreaded left. Positions the GOP took proudly just 20 years ago now seem prehistoric and its motivations for doing so, threadbare. This is not about morality, the constitution or faith. It never was.
No, this is about using the law to validate the primal sense of “ick” that still afflicts some heterosexuals at the thought of boys who like boys and girls who like girls. And the solution to their problem is three words long: Get over it.
Or, get left behind. Consider again what happened last week: Put aside NASCAR, the NBA and Angie’s List: Walmart is, for better and for worse, the very embodiment of Middle-American values. To rephrase what Lyndon Johnson said of Walter Cronkite under vastly different circumstances, if you have lost Walmart, you have lost the country.
On gay rights, conservatives just lost Wal-Mart.
The adults on the right (there are some) understand that they are out of step with the mainstream, which is why they’d just as soon call a truce in the so-called “culture wars.” The fanatical, id-driven children on the right (there are far too many) would rather drive the GOP off a cliff than concede. Somebody needs to sit them down and explain that when you have taken an execrable stand and been repudiated for it as decisively as the right has been, you only have two options: Change your stand, or shut your mouth.
At this point, either one will do.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, April 8, 2015
“A Large Pizza With A Side Of Hate”: The Next Time You Order An Extra-Large Pepperoni, Tell Them To Hold The Hate
The only purpose of the “religious freedom” laws in Indiana and other states is to assert that discrimination against gay people is acceptable. The only way to “fix” such measures is to repeal them.
As events this week have shown, the nation is becoming intolerant of intolerance. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) insisted that the absurdly titled “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” was not meant to enable discrimination. But no sooner had the ink dried on the new law than a local pizzeria announced it was just raring to discriminate.
“If a gay couple came in and wanted us to provide pizzas for their wedding, we would have to say no,” said Crystal O’Connor, whose family owns and operates Memories Pizza in Walkerton, Ind.
As a practical matter, I’m betting that few couples, gay or straight, would be devastated to go without pizza at their wedding reception. But that’s not the point. O’Connor correctly understood that the law was intended to let her discriminate against gay couples. Her family’s Christian beliefs, she said, lead her to disapprove of same-sex marriage.
It is her right to believe whatever she wants. Religious liberty is guaranteed by the Constitution. But in a pluralistic society, freedom of worship cannot mean a business that serves the general public can discriminate. When I was growing up in the South, there were business owners who believed the Lord didn’t intend for different races to mix, much less marry. Federal civil rights legislation barred these businesses from acting on that belief. The proprietors got over it.
At Pence’s urging, the Indiana legislature quickly came up with a proposal to amend the law to prohibit discrimination based on “race, color, religion, ancestry, age, national origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or United States military service.” Pence signed it into law on Thursday. In other words: Never mind the whole thing, and we’re sorry we bothered everyone.
Read that list and contemplate the supreme irony: Indiana has ended up with an anti-discrimination law protecting the LGBT community that is among the toughest in the nation. Apparently, there will be pizza for everyone.
Doubtless with an eye toward Pence’s travails, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) announced that he will not sign the religious-freedom law his legislature just handed him without significant changes, probably along the lines of those done in Indiana.
Pence was a big supporter of the original law, so why the rapid moonwalk in the opposite direction? Because the business community, both locally and nationally, announced its opposition and activists began talking about a boycott of the state. Because the NCAA, which is holding the Final Four tournament in Indianapolis this weekend, announced its urgent concern. Because Apple chief executive Tim Cook, who heads the most valuable company in the universe, wrote a Post op-ed denouncing the Indiana law as discriminatory.
In Arkansas, Hutchinson heard expressions of concern from Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer — which happens to be headquartered in Bentonville, Ark. When Wal-Mart calls, and you’re governor of Arkansas, you pick up the phone.
About 20 states already have these religious-freedom laws on the books, although most are not as far-reaching as Indiana’s. There is no indication that rampant discrimination is taking place — but that’s not the point. The clear target is same-sex marriage, and the intention is to reassure citizens that discrimination against same-sex couples is at least theoretically permissible.
The fact that we don’t hear of these laws actually being used proves a truth about same-sex marriage that should be blindingly obvious: Whether two men or two women decide to marry has not the slightest impact on anyone else.
Just a decade ago, most gay activists considered same-sex marriage a bridge too far. Today, it’s the law in 37 states and the District. The world has not come to an end. “Traditional” marriage has not been threatened. Opponents cannot cite one negative impact on society, unless you count the deprivation felt by citizens who need somebody, anybody, to discriminate against.
With a few exceptions, such as Hobby Lobby, the business community has decided that bigotry is bad for the bottom line. Politicians can fight the likes of Apple, Wal-Mart and the NCAA if they want. It’s just not a high-percentage move.
Which brings me to the wrenching struggle the Republican Party is having with itself over the issue. It’s time for the GOP to get on the right side of history. The next time you order an extra-large pepperoni, tell them to hold the hate.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 2, 2015
“The Great National ‘Franksgiving’ Uproar”: Imagine The Reaction If Obama Used An Executive Order To Change Date Of A Major Holiday
The story of Franklin Roosevelt moving Thanksgiving is probably pretty well known, but with the holiday coming up tomorrow, and with the ongoing debate about executive powers apparently fresh on the political world’s mind, it’s probably worth a trip down memory lane.
Historically, Thanksgiving was celebrated on the final Thursday of November. But in 1939, with the nation still dealing with the effects of the Great Depression and the unemployment rate above 15%, there was a small problem with the calendar: Thanksgiving fell on Nov. 30.
This may not sound especially important, but for businesses relying on holiday sales, this was a threat to bottom lines – it shortened the number of shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Business owners, pointing to the weak economy, demanded action.
And FDR delivered, issuing an executive order that moved the official date of Thanksgiving up a week, from Nov. 30 to Nov. 23. As Andrew Prokop explained, this really didn’t go over well.
What may have seemed like a wonkish, technocratic, good-government policy clashed with what turned out to be deeply-ingrained feelings among many Americans about when Thanksgiving should be celebrated. The Associated Press story announcing the move said Roosevelt “was shattering another precedent,” and quoted a town official of Plymouth, Massachusetts saying the traditional date was “sacred.” […]
Republicans pounced, and used the move to portray Roosevelt as a power-mad tyrant. In an early example of Godwin’s Law, FDR’s recent presidential opponent Alf Landon said Roosevelt sprung his decision on “an unprepared country with the omnipotence of a Hitler.” Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire suggested that while Roosevelt was at it, he should abolish winter.
One Republican mayor labeled the new date “Franksgiving.” Extending the protest further, roughly half the states chose to honor the old date rather than the new one.
The date then bounced around for a couple of years, until Congress eventually passed a new law, moving the date from the final Thursday in November to the fourth Thursday in November.
So, FDR and businesses owners scored a partial win, at least insofar as the Nov. 30 problem is concerned.
The thing I like about this story now is its contemporary salience: President Obama, for example, is not the first Democratic president that Republicans compared to Hitler.
Plus, try to imagine the reaction if Obama used an executive order to change the date of a major holiday without congressional approval. If his critics go berserk when he uses prosecutorial discretion on immigration, Republicans might very well faint if Thanksgiving moved to create more shopping days.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 27, 2014
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