“The G.O.P.’s Holy War”: Righteousness Is A Tricky Business, It Has A Way Of Coming Back To Bite You
In the final, furious days of campaigning here, it was sometimes hard to tell whether this state’s Republicans were poised to vote for a president or a preacher, a commander or a crusader.
The references to religion were expansive. The talk of it was excessive. A few candidates didn’t just profess the supposed purity of their own faith. They questioned rivals’ piety, with Ted Cruz inevitably leading the way.
A rally of his devolved into an inquisition of Donald Trump. Speakers mocked Trump’s occasional claims of devout Christianity. Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, pointedly recalled Trump’s admission last summer that he never really does penance.
Cruz, in contrast, “probably gets up every morning and asks God for forgiveness at least a couple of times, even before breakfast,” Perry told the audience.
The evangelist or the apostate: That’s how the choice was framed. And it underscored the extent to which the Iowa caucuses have turned into an unsettling holy war.
Religion routinely plays a prominent part in political campaigns, especially on the Republican side, and always has an outsize role in Iowa, where evangelical Christians make up an especially large fraction of the Republican electorate.
But there was a particular edge to the discussion this time around. It reflected Trump’s surprising strength among evangelicals and his adversaries’ obvious befuddlement and consternation about that.
Cruz’s whole strategy for capturing the presidency hinges on evangelicals’ support, as Robert Draper details in The Times Magazine.
He rails against abortion rights and same-sex marriage in speeches that sound like sermons, with references to Scripture and invocations of God.
He ended a question-and-answer session with Iowans that I attended in a typical fashion, asking them to use the waning hours until the caucuses to pray.
“Spend just a minute a day saying, ‘Father, God, please,’” he implored them. “Continue this awakening. Continue this spirit of revival. Awaken the body of Christ to pull this country back from the abyss.”
But righteousness is a tricky business. It has a way of coming back to bite you.
A super PAC supporting Mike Huckabee produced an ad for both radio and TV in which two women express doubts about Cruz’s commitment to Christian causes, saying that he speaks in one way to Iowans and in another to New Yorkers whose campaign donations he needs.
“I also heard that Cruz gives less than 1 percent to charity and church,” says one of the two women.
“He doesn’t tithe?” asks the other. “A millionaire that brags about his faith all the time?” They conclude that he’s a phony.
Maybe. Maybe not.
It’s impossible to know the genuineness of someone’s faith. That’s among the reasons we shouldn’t grant it center stage.
Religion was integral to our country’s founding. It’s central to our understanding of the liberty that each of us deserves. But so are the principles that we don’t enshrine any one creed or submit anyone — including those running for office — to religious litmus tests.
So why does a Republican race frequently resemble such an exam?
The winner of the Iowa caucuses in 2012 was Rick Santorum, who put his Catholicism at the forefront of his campaign. The winner in 2008 was Mike Huckabee, a former evangelical pastor who never let you forget that.
To emerge victorious in 2016, several candidates are leaning hard on religion, hoping it’s an advantage over Trump.
But just as God is said to work in mysterious ways, religion is working in unexpected ways in this campaign. According to some national polls, more evangelicals back Trump than they do any other candidate.
That’s true although he’s on his third marriage; although he’s boasted of sexual conquests; although he went to the evangelical stronghold of Liberty University in 2012 and, in a rambling speech, mentioned the importance of prenuptial agreements; although he returned to Liberty University just weeks ago and revealed his inexperience in talking about the Bible by citing “two Corinthians” when anyone with any biblical fluency would have pronounced it “Second Corinthians.”
Liberty’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr., went so far as to endorse Trump, a development that clearly galled Trump’s rivals and bolstered their resolve to prove that they’re the better Christians.
Jeb Bush questioned Trump’s faith. Marco Rubio kept going out of his way to extol his own.
He released a television commercial here in which he speaks directly to the camera about what it means to be Christian. “Our goal is eternity, the ability to live alongside our creator for all time,” he says. “The purpose of our life is to cooperate with God’s plan.”
During last week’s debate, he worked religion into an answer to a question that had nothing to do with it. The Fox News anchor Bret Baier had asked him about his electability, mentioning a Time magazine story that called Rubio “the Republican savior.”
“Let me be clear about one thing,” Rubio responded. “There’s only one savior and it’s not me. It’s Jesus Christ, who came down to Earth and died for our sins.”
And at a rally, Rubio visibly brightened when a voter brought up faith and gave him an opportunity to expound on it.
“I pray for wisdom,” he said. “The presidency of the United States is an extraordinary burden and you look at some of the greatest presidents in American history. They were very clear. They were on their knees all the time asking for God, asking God for the wisdom to solve, for the strength to persevere incredible tests.”
That same image came up at the Cruz event during which Perry denigrated Trump. One of the speakers expressed joy at the thought of “a president who’s willing to kneel down and ask God for guidance as he’s leading our country.”
Cruz had declared such willingness in Iowa in November at an evangelical conference where a right-wing pastor talked about the death penalty for gay people and the need for candidates to accept Jesus as the “king of the president of the United States.”
“Any president who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander in chief of this country,” Cruz said then.
I’m less interested in whether a president kneels down than in whether he or she stands up for the important values that many religions teach — altruism, mercy, sacrifice — along with the religious pluralism that this country rightly cherishes. And while I agree that Trump is unfit for the Oval Office, Corinthians has nothing to do with it.
By: Frank Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 30, 2016
“I Fear I Have Been Mistaken”: President Trump is Now A Possibility. And It’s Terrifying
Like many members of the media, I have spent much of the past six months pretending I have some idea of what will happen in the presidential election. Specifically, I have maintained a sanguine and somewhat bemused certainty that, whatever else happens, there will be no President Trump.
Today, with every meaning of this phrase, I fear I have been mistaken. At this moment, with the final Des Moines Register poll in and considering what I have seen and read about Trump’s supporters in Iowa and elsewhere, it would be foolish to say that President Trump isn’t a possibility. And that is terrifying.
Here are the things I have said to tamp down the notion that Trump could win the nomination:
“The establishment Republicans will rally behind a candidate.”
“He doesn’t speak the language of the evangelical voter.”
“Veterans will see right through him.”
“He doesn’t have a real infrastructure or ground game.”
“You can’t win without making significant ad buys.”
“His negatives are too high to get very far.”
“His supporters aren’t dedicated enough to caucus.”
I’m still holding on to some hope for the last one. (Not since high school have I wished so fervently for a snow day.) The rest of these assumptions have either been falsified or called into significant question.
You’ll notice I didn’t even bother listing the numerous things Trump has said to offend people. I have stopped believing it is possible for Trump to give offense – or, rather, I have stopped believing that giving offense is a reason people would cease to support him.
All he really needs to do is win Iowa — an increasingly likely outcome. After that… Well, tell me the first state he’ll lose. Not New Hampshire (leads by 18). Not South Carolina (leads by 15). Not Nevada (leads by 12). Super Tuesday states have been infrequently polled, but the two with the biggest delegate prizes (proportionally distributed) have recent results. Trump leads in Georgia by 10 points, and in Texas the “poll of polls” has him closing the gap with, ahem, “native son” Cruz to just two points. In Florida, he leads by 17 points.
What’s more, polls of a shrinking field seem to suggest that as long as a standard-bearer for the establishment remains in the race, Trump will continue to dominate. Cruz emerges the victor only in a head-to-head battle – a bittersweet indication for Cruz that he is not quite as hated by moderate Republicans as he either claims or should be.
I will refrain from running through specific general election scenarios, because — she sighs heavily — we are not there yet. Here is where we are: The strong possibility that Trump will get the GOP nomination, and that means that there is a non-zero chance that he will win the general election.
Non-zero is, to say the least, less that certain, but it’s a greater chance than most political professionals have given him up until… now. And non-zero is enough to scare the shit out of me.
Rationally, a Trump primary victory is clearly disturbing, but until this week I hadn’t considered it beyond an uncomfortable commentary on the Republican electorate on the way to a certain Democratic victory.
If we – I – have been so wrong about Trump’s chances at making it to the general, then I think it’s only appropriate to question all our assumptions about his chances nationally.
I spent much of this week reading and watching interviews with Trump supporters. I’d taken the previously reported incidents of slurs and scuffles at rallies seriously, of course. But a distracting voice in my head countered that crowds take on their own personalities, that protesters often intend to provoke responses, and that, besides, could you really ascribe the same level of ugliness to everyone? Surely, those responses were the extreme of the extreme.
Go read the report put together by CNN. It’s a collection of quotes left to stand mostly on their own, taken not from those kicking and punching and shouting but the rest of the crowd. There is nothing new here, not really, it’s the same ill-informed nationalist doggerel as he spouts. It’s chilling not because it’s somehow more extreme than you thought it’d be but rather because their complaints are so uniform and matter-of-fact:
“White Americans founded this country,” one 64-year-old woman told CNN. “We are being pushed aside because of the President’s administration and the media.”
A recent study delivered statistical proof of the mindset only implied by the language: Trump supporters are attracted to a quality that goes beyond “being a successful businessman.” They are attracted to his authoritarianism. They are, in fact, in favor of turning authoritarian ideas into policy:
Trump voters exhibit statistically significant and substantive authoritarian attitudes. For example, Trump voters are statistically more likely to agree that other groups should sometimes be kept in their place. They support preventing minority opposition once we decide what is right.
Trump supporters kick the fundamental tenets of Madisonian democracy to the curb, asserting that the rights of minorities need not be protected from the power of the majority. And they are statistically more likely than Trump opponents to agree the president should curtail the voice and vote of the opposition when it is necessary to protect the country.
To put it another way. The frightening thing about Trump voters is not that they’re angry, it’s that they believe they’re right—and they believe they’re winning.
Trump has, to use language Trumpkins would likely sneer at, empowered them. That sense of empowerment matters because the difference between authoritarians and populists is any sense of respect for minority opinions. In a world run by authoritarians, the only break on unjust behavior is whether you can get away it.
So, now, imagine a Trump nomination. Imagine how empowering that would be, and to whom.
There are two prevailing theories for why journalists and data crunchers got Trump’s trajectory wrong. One argument has it that Trump’s candidacy is a “black swan event”—an unprecedented amalgam of unreproducible and unpredictable circumstances, simply too weird to have foreseen.
I like that theory because it lets us off the hook, somewhat. And, well, it’s not an inaccurate description… but it’s really more of a description than an explanation. What’s more: all swans look gray in the rearview mirror. The end of Trump might look like the rise of nationalism in Europe or might look like Goldwater’s defeat. But it will look like something that has happened before, because everything does.
Another theory as to pundits’ blinkeredness, popular on the right, has it that we in the political world were simply too caught up in our cocktails and TV green room chatter to notice what was going on out there in “real America.”
This certainly feels close to the truth. There is darkness to be found out there, in the rallying around Kim Davis and the rejection of civil rights in Houston. On the other hand: “Real America” is multifaceted and self-contradictory, like most other real things. Americans show growing, support for an increased minimum wage and police body cameras, and young people have a historically high rate of interracial dating. How were we supposed to pick out the authoritarian strain from the progressive one?
I think we didn’t see Trump coming because we lacked imagination.
Science fiction has done a better job at predicting Trump’s success than political science has, after all. Neal Stephenson Interface describes a candidate guided via the input of real-time polling data directly into his brain. (He even decides to skip a debate.) Dark Mirror has plumbed the phenomenon of “a “joke” candidate becoming so popular that the forces behind him slip easily into despotism and violence.
Social scientists and journalists imprison themselves behind conventional wisdom and, to a lesser extent, evidence–the dark impulses that fuel Trump’s supporters have been mostly invisible to the naked eye: Sure, around the fringes of the Tea Party and in the twisty bowels of internet comments, one could sense the anger and racism, but I avoided looking into the abyss and preferred instead to gesture towards the more intelligible gamesmanship of Washington insiders.
It’s no secret that Trump’s rise has created history’s longest hot mic moment for the media. We have been caught without a script, and the rote truisms and filler material that usually fills the awkward silences have proven increasingly inappropriate to the unprecedented tragicomedy playing out before us.
I now see what my problem was: in discounting Trump’s chances, I relied on guidance from history and reason. These are inadequate defenses against the forces at work in Trump’s rise.
Logic didn’t help us foresee him and won’t work against him. We can’t argue policy, we are going to need something more like a Patronus.
I am not endorsing magical thinking; beliefs in no-cost shortcuts, legends, and mythical creatures are what brought us Trump. But we will need more than debate, a force stronger than facts.
I suspect we’ll need love: love for our country, for the people in it, for the ideas it stands for.
We have to love our country and what it can be more than Trump supporters fear what they believe it’s becoming. His power stems from their belief in that darkness – and with persistence and patience and heart, we’re going to have to make them see the light.
By: Ana Marie Cox, The Daily Beast, January 31, 2016
“And They Can’t Seem To Shake It”: The GOP’s Conception Of The Republican Primary Is Laughably Wrong
Ever since Donald Trump vaulted to the top of Republican presidential primary polls, GOP strategists have clung to the view that he could be defeated the same way so many other insurgent candidates have: First, party actors would settle on a single candidate to represent the party’s institutional wing; then, slowly, that candidate would consolidate institutional and stakeholder support, until, by late January or some time in February, he would enjoy plurality support, if not majority support, of primary voters and eventually clinch the nomination.
This is how Mitt Romney fended off late favorites like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum in 2012, and how, in slightly more chaotic fashion, John McCain climbed out of purgatory to win in 2008.
Two things changed in the 2016 cycle. First, Trump established dominance like no other insurgent candidate ever has. Though dark horse after dark horse charged into the race, none of them were able to truly split the reactionary vote with him. Second, no Romney or McCain-like figure ever emerged. Jeb Bush, who was tailored for that role, faltered almost immediately, paralyzing the establishment and fracturing its support among several (currently four) candidates with whom party leaders would be satisfied.
Nevertheless, the smartest minds in the GOP have maintained their faith in the old model. So committed to it are they that they’ve devoted a great deal of effort in recent days to damaging the first plausible competitor to Trump—Ted Cruz—because Cruz, equally detested and unelectable, also spoils their strategic analysis.
Nearly all available public evidence suggests this conception of the race isn’t just wrong, but laughably simplistic and far from representative of GOP voters’ preferences. The tragic thing for Republican leaders is that as poor as this strategic analysis seems to be, the other approaches available to them are just as bad or worse.
The fatal conceit of establishment Republicans’ strategy is its belief in a zero-sum relationship between the candidates that would satisfy them and the amount of support those candidates have within the GOP electorate. That a fixed segment of voters will behave in a way that perfectly mirrors the establishment’s political strategy. That if Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich enjoy a combined 25 percent support of Republican voters, then winnowing that “lane” down to one will yield a single candidate with 25 percent support.
If this were true, you’d expect any one of those candidates’ misfortunes to redound to the benefit of one or more of the others. Instead, poll after poll suggests that as other candidates falter, it redounds more to Trump and/or Cruz’s benefit than to anyone in the not-quite-hermetically sealed establishment cocoon.
Perhaps there are no “lanes” at all, or perhaps the lanes function very literally in that changing from one to another is easy and appealing when the one you’re in is backed up. The widely expected consolidation we were all promised is playing out more like a defection to leading, insurgent candidates. It may just be the case that voters whose first choice is a brash executive like Chris Christie, or a Cuban-descended avatar of the Tea Party like Marco Rubio, might see Trump or Cruz as a more natural second choice than another candidate with establishment backing.
Under the circumstances, you might have expected mainline Republican operatives to remain neutral in the Trump-Cruz feud, reflecting a last-best hope that the two would damage each other, or at least prevent one another from running away with the race.
Instead, terrified by the possibility that their theory of consolidation would work on behalf of a candidate (Cruz) whom they despise, many of these operatives have forged alliances of convenience with Trump, in order to arrest Cruz’s popularity before Monday’s Iowa caucuses. The problem is that this, too, is redounding to Trump’s benefit, rather than to the benefit of anyone else running.
If Cruz were to win in Iowa, where he was leading until this week, he would at least buy the establishment time to regroup after New Hampshire, where Trump leads mightily. Instead, the party’s faith in its own power to defeat Trump, mano-a-mano-a-mano-a-mano-a-mano, has increased the chances that he will sweep the first three contests and never look back.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor at The New Republic, January 26, 2016
“The Classier Of Two Evils”: Cruz Is The Leader Of A Faction; Trump Is A One-Man Band
With less than two weeks till the Iowa Caucus, the shape of the Republican race could hardly be more frightening for the Republican establishment. Both of the two leading candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, carry baggage that would make winning the general election a tough slog. But while some establishment types still hold out hope that one of their preferred candidates—Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, or even Chris Christie—can pull off a surprise resurgence, there is a growing acceptance of the reality of having to chose between Cruz and Trump. And the surprise is that all signs are pointing to Trump being the establishment’s favored candidate—or, more accurately, the lesser of two evils.
In an interview with the New York Times yesterday, Bob Dole, the Republican presidential nominee in 1996 and the very epitome of the party establishment, said that picking Cruz as the presidential nominee would be “cataclysmic,” and the party would have better success with Trump. And it’s not just on the electability issue that Dole prefers Trump. Dole denounced Cruz as an “extremist,” but said that Trump has the type of deal-making personality that would allow him to work with Congress if elected. Cruz, he said, would not. “I don’t know how he’s going to deal with Congress,” Dole told the Times. “Nobody likes him.”
Dole is far from alone in making a move toward Trump’s camp. According to a report in the Washington Post, the GOP donor class is increasingly seeing Trump as a better bet than Cruz. “A lot of donors are trying to figure their way into Trump’s orbit,” said Spencer Zwick, who ran the finances for Mitt Romney’s 2012 bid.
On the face of it, preferring Trump to Cruz seems bizarre. After all, Cruz is a more conventional politician. He sits in the Senate, and he has longstanding ties to the conservative movement and speaks their language. Why spurn him and hook up with a wild card like Trump, who has no political experience—and a record of making reckless racist and sexist comments that will damage the Republican brand?
But it’s possible that it is precisely because Trump is such an unusual figure that he might be more attractive to establishment Republicans. Cruz is the leader of a faction; Trump is a one-man band. This means Cruz has the potential to do much more damage to the Republican Party in the long run. “If Trump loses, we wash our hands of him,” a leading GOP strategist told CNN. “Cruz will think we need to be more crazy and be a long-term nightmare.”
If Cruz wins the nomination, that extreme-right faction will dominate the Republican Party not just in the presidential run but for the foreseeable future—even if Cruz loses. Just as the followers of Barry Goldwater held key positions in the party long after 1964, Cruz’s followers will be lodged tight and will be in a stronger position to combat the RINOs.
“If Cruz wins, the Loony Bird takeover of the GOP is complete,” Ian Millhiser, Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress Action Fund, told me by email, sketching out the establishment’s nightmare scenario: “GOP candidates view Cruz’s election as vindication of Cruz’s tactics, and they rush to emulate him. Rank-and-file voters embrace Cruz’s message that the best candidates are belligerent conservatives. And interest groups decide that they no longer need to back the proverbial most conservative candidate who can win, because the very most conservative candidate has just won the presidency. So they use their money to back Cruz clones in primaries.
“Mitch McConnell and possibly even Paul Ryan’s relevance disappears overnight, as does quite possibly their career in politics. And because all of the sitting Republican lawmakers are Cruz clones who view them as traitorous RINOs, the deposed establishment cannot even cash in as lobbyists.”
Trump, on the other hand, is so anomalous a figure that the GOP establishment can console themselves with the knowledge that he leads no faction. Even if he wins the nomination, Trump can be safely relegated to the category of a one-off, a freak mutation, never to be repeated. Trump would be like the character The Mule, in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels. In the schema of Asimov’s far future science-fiction series, The Mule is a galactic conquerer who throws history off the course that it was expected to take, but the changes he introduces are ultimately minor because he has no successor.
From the point of view of the Republican elite, it’s easy to see Trump as The Mule: He’s unexpected, he disrupted their plans to coronate Jeb Bush, but he’s also someone who can’t leave a lasting legacy because the traits that made him who he is are not replicable. There are not that many billionaire reality-show stars who are interested in taking over a political party.
Further, because Trump is much more pragmatic than Cruz, it’s easier to imagine him being tamed if he won the presidency. Already, on the issue of tax cuts for the rich, Trump has reverted to GOP orthodoxy. Unlike Cruz, Trump has no army of ideological loyalists working with him. President Trump would need advisers and policymakers, which the Republican Party could happily provide him.
If this is the gamble the GOP is taking, though, it is not necessarily the right one. Trump is an unstable and unpredictable figure, governed by personal piques that take him in strange directions—like his recent, bizarre twitter feud with the actor Samuel L. Jackson over cheating at golf. As a presidential nominee, Trump would likely continue to be flighty and capricious. If Hillary Clinton is his rival for the White House, it’s a near-certainty that Trump will make sexist tirades that will damage the GOP’s reputation, as he already has with comments on Megyn Kelly and Carly Fiorina. Moreover, unlike Cruz or the other, more polished candidates, Trump does not know how to disguise his racism with dog-whistles. This may not hurt Trump with GOP primary voters, but it would be toxic on the national stage.
The fact that the GOP elite is sidling up to Trump is remarkable—and perhaps the ultimate reflection on Ted Cruz as a man and politician. After all, how wretched must he be that there are people who prefer to stake their money and reputations on Donald Trump?
By: Jeet Heer, The New Republic, January 21, 2016
“Not The America Of The Future”: GOP A Bridge To 1960, When 90 Percent Of The Population Was White
It’s hardly news to observe that partisan polarization in this country is reinforced by sharp divisions in the demographic composition of the two major parties. But National Journal‘s Ron Brownstein offers one bit of data that dramatizes the issue as well as any I’ve seen:
In 2012, whites accounted for about 90 percent of both the ballots cast in the Republican presidential primaries and the votes Mitt Romney received in the general election. The last time whites represented 90 percent of the total American population was 1960.
Think about that. If the Republican Party were a country, it would racially resemble the America of 1960, 55 years ago. Brownstein goes on to argue that Democrats are also out of alignment with today’s demographics — but it most resembles an America of the future, and the not-too-distant future at that.
Ethnic groups now equal just over 37 percent of Americans. But voters of color accounted for nearly 45 percent of President Obama’s votes in 2012. Ethnic minorities likely won’t equal that much of the total population for about another 15 years.
If one party (whose average age of about 52 means that a sizable minority can actually remember the America of 1960) is composed of people who are both aware of their once-dominant position and of how quickly it is slipping away, is there any reason to be surprised that party is strongly influenced by feelings that the country has taken a wrong turn that must be resisted? And should anyone be shocked that reaction to cultural and demographic change might well begin to compete with free-market economics or universalistic values in shaping the party’s positions and leadership?
I don’t think so. When in response to Bill Clinton’s promise to “build a bridge to the 21st century,” 1996 GOP nominee Bob Dole — first elected to Congress in 1960 — described his Republican presidential campaign as “a bridge to an America that only the unknowing call myth,” he ironically hit on his party’s future message.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, January 22, 2016
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