“Donald Trump And The End Of Civility”: Rejecting The Virtues Of Teamwork, Common Courtesy And Civility
For a decade we have seen article after article, study after study, comment after comment on the death of civility in our politics. Politicians, pundits and academics worried that gridlock and the paralysis of Washington was heavily due to the nastiness of the political culture and the vitriol inherent in today’s politics.
Well, as Donald Trump might say – you ain’t seen nothing yet!
My friend, Ira Shapiro, wrote a terrific book, “The Last Great Senate,” about the accomplishments of the civil and functional U. S. Senate that we were both privileged to be a part of a few decades ago. Whether it was the Panama Canal treaties, passage of environmental legislation or social security reform, Republicans and Democrats actually worked together, forged compromises and got the people’s business done.
But as Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann chronicled in their book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” published in 2012, the rise of tea party extremists and hard-right ideologues has polarized and paralyzed our constitutional system of government.
And now in 2016, we have Donald Trump, who would make Ornstein and Mann’s world of just a few years ago look like patty-cake. Trump, and many of his colleagues in this race who have followed his lead, has debased the dialogue and engaged in trash talk that would make a pro football player blush. It has truly spiraled out of control.
Facts and logical argument are cast to the wind like confetti; nasty statements about body parts are common and invective like “stupid,” “idiot,” “lightweight,” “choker,” “loser” are used by Trump in nearly every speech and press conference.
No one is writing about a return to civility so long as Trump has seized the stage, forcing a dialogue that has taken American politics even further down into the gutter. In fact, Trump has left many people who should be speaking out speechless instead. Now Republicans and conservative columnists are shaking their heads and wondering why the other candidates and Republican Party leadership have kept their heads in the sand for so long. A flood of pieces by the likes of David Brooks and George Will spell it out perfectly: talking about “the governing cancer” and Trump’s “demagogic cynicism and anti-constitutional authoritarianism.”
But I fault those Republicans and conservative pundits who clearly should have been focusing on this transformation from a government that governed and legislators who legislated into a collection of talking heads whose constant desire is to be on gladiator-TV. Or to give a speech that incites a crowd. Many of them embraced the tea party and chose demagoguery over dialogue.
What has happened to words such as thoughtful, wise, substantive, open-minded and even educated, learned and knowledgeable to describe those in the arena of politics and government? Why are those not the standards we use to judge our leaders?
I am left with the enduring cover image from The New Yorker a number of weeks ago, showing a television set with Donald Trump raging and Presidents Washington, Lincoln, Kennedy and Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt looking on in horror.
This is no longer amusing nor something that should be passed off as entertainment. This is not “The Apprentice” or some reality television show. This is real.
If we allow a person like Donald Trump to capture the Republican Party, let alone the country, the price we will pay will be lasting, and the damage will be serious and permanent. This is so far from anything we have experienced; that it has no parallel in our history. He is not, as he says, building a new expanded Republican Party. This “movement” is based on fear and loathing, racism and prejudice, xenophobia and hatred. It is based on our basest instincts, not on our best instincts. It is destructive, not constructive.
With a Trump ascendancy, common courtesy and civility will be considered weaknesses and the politics of irrationalism and fear will triumph. That must not happen.
By: Peter Fenn, Democratic Political Strategist and Head of Fenn Communications; U. S. News and World Report, March 3, 2016
“The Odd Man Out”: For Ted Cruz, Anti-Trump Cabal Could Be A Suicide Pact
For Marco Rubio and John Kasich, the current anti-Trump cabal whereby every surviving candidate takes on the Donald in different states via a division of labor that involves tactical cooperation is a no-brainer. Both of these dudes face possible extinction in winner-take-all home-state primaries on March 15 in which they’ll need every anti-Trump vote. More fundamentally, they are in third and fourth place in total delegates. Rubio, in particular, is no longer in a position to insist on consolidation of non-Trump voters under his banner. But for Ted Cruz, the cabal forces a tough decision. He’s not in a position to stop Trump on his own. But if he cooperates with Rubio and Kasich and a Republican Establishment that despises him nearly as much as it does Trump, he could be enabling his own demise down the road and thwarting his own efforts to seize the party for the more militant elements of the conservative movement.
At the moment, Team Cruz is focused on the short-term challenge of winning in three states that vote tomorrow: Kansas, Kentucky, and Louisiana. The first two are closed caucuses with long-passed cutoffs for reregistration to change party affiliation — probably the least hospitable environment for Donald Trump’s campaign. And Louisiana is a closed primary in a state where Cruz has been running a relatively strong second to Trump in the polls. If the mauling of Trump in the Fox News debate in Detroit Thursday night produced lasting damage to his candidacy, it should begin to show up in these states.
But assuming March 6 goes well for Cruz, the strategic dilemmas begin. Sure, he’ll go for the gold in Mississippi and Idaho on March 8. But does he take a dive the same day in Michigan, where he’s been running even with Rubio and well ahead of Kasich? And does he entirely pull his campaign out of Florida and Ohio on March 15 to maximize the home-state cabal boys’ odds of beating Trump? Presumably he will, but he could wake up on March 16 to find his delegate advantage greatly reduced, and with the remaining list of Cruz Country states on the calendar looking mighty slim.
Looking ahead to the potential “contested convention” that is the anti-Trump cabal’s strategic linchpin, Cruz’s main leverage is the possibility that he could put Trump over the top on a second ballot if he is prematurely cast aside by the Establishment folk. He could even position himself as a “unity candidate” whose views on immigration and national security are closer to Trump’s than any other available candidate’s. More likely he’ll be the odd man out in whatever decisions the Establishment makes, having already burned his bridges to Trump’s insurgency to a smoking cinder. Right now the candidate running second to Trump seems doomed to failure whichever way he — or the worm — turns. His consolation will be that, like Rubio, he’s still very young, and, unlike Rubio, he hasn’t given up his Senate seat to participate in this wild presidential nominating contest.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, March 4, 2016
“Marco Rubio Is Right: Donald Trump Is A Con Man”: The Key To The Donald’s Success Has Always Been A Gullible Public
Even now, as Republicans mount a last, desperate attempt to stop Donald Trump, they have to do it on his terms, not theirs.
They tried saying he wasn’t conservative enough, because, they thought, isn’t that what we’ve been arguing about for the last few years? Who’s a real conservative and who isn’t? But it turned out that while ideology matters a great deal to the elite, it’s less important to the rank and file, and it doesn’t matter at all to the plurality of Republican voters supporting Trump. Then they figured he might just implode on his own, so nobody bothered to dig up the dirt that would arm them against him. Despite the fact that there surely is plenty there.
It was the South Carolina primary that finally made Republicans realize that everything they had been doing when it came to Trump was wrong. It wasn’t just that he won, it was that he won after a debate in which he actually—brace yourself—criticized George W. Bush for not stopping September 11. Jaws hung slack as one of the most critical conservative taboos was violated, and someone calling himself a Republican mocked the idea that Bush “kept us safe.” Then Trump won South Carolina anyway, and won Nevada to boot.
After that, Marco Rubio obviously decided that the only way to beat Trump was to be Trump, or at least a somewhat less compelling version of him. So the guy who had touted himself as knowledgeable, smart, and serious went out and started tossing personal insults at Trump, with all the cleverness of your average fifth grader. “Donald Trump likes to sue people,” Rubio said. “He should sue whoever did that to his face.” Zing! Trump replied that Rubio isn’t smart enough to get into the University of Pennsylvania, where he went to school. Zap!
Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln would be so proud.
But in the back-and-forth, Rubio may have come upon an attack that might lead some people to reconsider their support of Trump: that he’s a con man.
At the moment, Rubio is making the case through the story of Trump University, which does indeed appear to have been a con. People desperate to change their financial circumstances were roped into seminars on the belief they’d be learning Trump’s real-estate secrets, when in fact, “The contents and materials presented by Trump University were developed in large part by a third-party company that creates and develops materials for an array of motivational speakers and seminar and time-share rental companies,” according to a lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. Once they had you there, they’d tell you that to learn the real secrets you’d have to pay for a higher-level (and of course even more expensive) seminar. And the instructors “urged students to call their credit card companies during a break in the sessions, requesting increases to their credit limits.”
While Trump University may be the clearest example of a con game Trump has established, is it really that far from Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, or the Trump presidential campaign? Trump’s business these days is less about real estate than it is about monetizing his brand. Here’s the model: Take a crappy third-rate product, slap the name “Trump” on it, and hope that rubes who are blinded by the big plane and the gold-plated furnishings will think they’re buying success.
But the idea that Trump is a con man isn’t potent simply because it’s true. Like the most successful campaign messages, it not only tells you something about who the candidate is, it tells you something about who you are if you vote for him.
The best presidential campaigns have always done this. If you voted for Richard Nixon in 1968, you were part of the Silent Majority, the ones who were sick and tired of hippies and protesters and the degradation of their society. If you voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980, you were optimistic and confident, ready to march into an American future that would be just like the past, only even better. And if you voted for Barack Obama in 2008, you were young, hip, creative, multicultural, open-minded, and future-oriented.
The story Trump tells is that his voters are fed up with losing, angry at the idiots in Washington, and ready for a strong leader who can kick the stuffing out of all the immigrants and foreigners keeping us down. But there’s another story you can tell about them: They’re marks. They’re losers. They’re suckers.
Every con man needs suckers, after all—the people who are gullible and dumb enough to turn over their money (or in this case their votes) to the one doing the conning. But a sucker is the last thing anyone wants to be.
The trouble is that America is full of suckers. We’re a nation of people who pay money to have motivational speakers tell us to reach for our dreams, who buy books describing three-year-olds who got to heaven and meet Jesus on his “rainbow horse,” who also bought millions and millions of copies of The Secret, which told you that if you wanted something, like a new Hermes handbag, you just needed to imagine yourself having it and it would actualize its way to you. We’re a nation of the Puritan ethic but also of the get-rich-quick scheme, and Donald Trump’s presidential run is the ultimate get-rich-quick scheme. Just vote for Trump, and before you know it “We will have so much winning … you will get bored with winning.”
Well if you believe that, you are indeed a sucker. The problem for Marco Rubio and the rest of the GOP is that it may just be too late to make the case. Super Tuesday is this week, and Trump may deliver a crushing blow to his opponents as all those suckers come out to vote for him, ready to make America great again. How long can he keep this con going? We’re all going to find out.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 2, 2016
“Secretly On The Ballot In November”: The Future Of The ‘Nuclear Option’ For Supreme Court Nominees
After the initial intense focus on President Obama’s determination to nominate a successor to Antonin Scalia and Senate Republicans’ determination to block him, it’s beginning to sink in that the struggle for control of the Supreme Court could be a complicated and drawn-out battle. As Juliet Eilperin and Robert Barnes of the Washington Post point out today, the next president could have more than one chance to appoint a justice, and both conservatives and liberals understand the stakes could be huge:
The Scalia vacancy technically gives Obama the chance to establish a liberal majority on the court for the first time in decades, but even if he manages to seat a new justice in the face of blanket GOP opposition, the victory could be fleeting …
Scalia’s death at age 79 shows the peril of making predictions about the Court’s future, but the age range among the current justices would suggest that a Republican successor to Obama could have greater impact on remaking the court than a Democrat, especially if Scalia’s seat stays vacant into the next administration. Simply put, the court’s liberal bloc is older and may offer more opportunities for replacement.
When the new president is inaugurated, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be almost 84. Anthony Kennedy will be 80 and Stephen Breyer, 78. Replacing Ginsburg and Breyer, both appointees of President Clinton, with conservatives would instantly shift the court’s balance for years, even if an Obama’s appointee were to replace Scalia. (The next oldest justice is Thomas, who was nominated by George H.W. Bush and will be 68 this summer.)
Many conservatives, of course, hate Kennedy, too; he was the swing vote in upholding Roe v. Wade in 1992, and played a key role in the Court’s marriage-equality decisions.
But more fundamentally, partisan polarization and gridlock in Congress has significantly elevated the importance of non-legislative entities, including the federal courts and executive-branch agencies whose power the courts might choose to expand or restrain. So control of the commanding heights of the Supreme Court is more important than ever.
What complicates the issue is the precedent set by Senate Democrats under Harry Reid in 2011 (Republicans had come close to taking the same action in 2005): the so-called “nuclear option,” removing the right to filibuster executive branch and non-SCOTUS judicial appointments. With both parties in the Senate steadily retreating from the ancient practice of deferring to the president’s choices for the High Court, and with the hot-button issues facing SCOTUS making “compromise” choices less feasible, the difference between having to muster 50 and 60 Senate votes to confirm a presidential nomination is increasingly momentous. And for that reason, if either party wins both the White House and the Senate this November, going “nuclear” on SCOTUS appointments by getting rid of the filibuster is a very high probability (and even if it doesn’t happen, the threat of “going nuclear” can and will be used to force the minority party to be reasonable).
But the converse situation is worth pondering, too. If, to cite a lively possibility, Democrats hang onto the White House while Republicans hang onto the Senate, there is no way the Senate invokes the “nuclear option.” Senate resistance to a progressive justice would likely stiffen in 2018, when Republicans will enjoy one of the most favorable Senate landscapes in memory. 25 of 33 Senate seats up that year are currently Democratic, including five in states Obama lost twice. Add in the recent GOP advantage in the kind of voters most likely to participate in midterm elections, and the ancient tendency of midterm voters to punish the party controlling the White House, and the odds of a Democratic president being able to impose her or his will on the Senate on crucial SCOTUS nominations between 2019 and 2021 is very slim.
If Democrats want to shape the Court’s future, they’d do well not only to win the White House but to take back the Senate this November, and get rid of the SCOTUS filibuster in hopes that restoring it will be too controversial for Republicans even if they reconquer the Senate in 2018. By then, of course, Senate Republicans may be looking forward to their own ability to shape the Court after 2020 if they win back the presidency then. It’s going to be a chess game with big and continuing arguments over the rules.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, February 29, 2016
“The White Supremacists’ Candidate”: Trump’s Racial Controversies Leave GOP In Awkward Spot
It was just a few days ago that Donald Trump, pressed to respond to support from former KKK leader David Duke, told reporters, ”I didn’t even know he endorsed me. David Duke endorsed me? I disavow, OK?”
Yesterday, however, Trump was asked again about support from overt racists, and this time, the Republican presidential candidate’s line grew murky.
In an interview Sunday morning, GOP front-runner Donald Trump would not condemn former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke’s support for his presidential campaign, telling CNN host Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” that he has no knowledge of the white supremacist leader.
“Just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke, okay? I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So I don’t know, did he endorse me or what’s going on,” Trump said.
Asked about his willingness to condemn white supremacists, Trump was hardly unequivocal. “Well, I have to look at the group,” he told Jake Tapper. “I mean, I don’t know what group you’re talking about. You wouldn’t want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about. I have to look. If you would send me a list of the groups I will do research on them and certainly I would disavow if I thought there was something wrong. But you may have groups in there that are totally fine and it would be very unfair. So give me a list of the groups and I’ll let you know.”
Not surprisingly, the exchange prompted yet another round of “Will this sink Trump’s campaign?” speculation, and it wasn’t long before the GOP candidate’s rivals were publicly criticizing Trump’s apparent reluctance to denounce his white-supremacist allies.
In a year like this one, guessing how conservative voters might respond to various developments is increasingly difficult. That said, it’s important to understand the degree to which the Republican Party is in an exceedingly awkward position.
At a Virginia event yesterday, for example, Marco Rubio was eager to denounce Trump’s latest racially charged controversy. And who was introducing Rubio on the campaign trail yesterday? That would be none other than Virginia’s former governor and senator, George Allen (R), whose career was cut short in the wake of his own racially charged controversy.
What’s more, while Trump evidently no longer knows what to say about David Duke, let’s also not forget that Louisiana’s Steve Scalise spoke at an event for white supremacists several years ago and described himself as “David Duke without the baggage.” House Republicans nevertheless made Steve Scalise the House Majority Whip – the #3 position in the House GOP leadership – and largely failed to even criticize him after the public learned about Scalise’s past.
More to the point, Trump’s most notable contribution to the political discourse – before his racially charged rhetoric as a presidential candidate – was his leadership role in the “birther” conspiracy theory, which, at its core, was racist nonsense. Republican leaders not only failed to denounce Trump’s ridiculous crusade, they also publicly welcomed his support and endorsements, Trump’s “birtherism” notwithstanding.
With this in mind, isn’t it a little late for GOP officials and candidates to wring their hands and claim the high ground? Had Republicans been consistent all along – removing Scalise from his leadership post, denouncing the “birther” garbage from the outset, etc. – the party would likely be in a more credible position now, but that point passed long ago.
Postscript: On a related note, Rachel has an incredibly well-timed piece in the Washington Post that you’re going to want to check out: What does it say about the GOP that Trump is the white supremacists’ candidate?”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 29, 2016
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