“Doing It Wrong”: Stop Attacking Donald Trump’s Politics; Attack His Character Instead
Some Republicans, at least, are starting to cotton up to the idea that if you don’t want someone to win, maybe you attack him. Marco Rubio has begun attacking Donald Trump on the stump. It’s a pretty timid jab, but a significant one for the very message-disciplined candidate who has tried to run a positive campaign.
The problem is that he’s been doing it wrong. Conservatives have insisted on attacking Trump on policy, and in one direction: charging him for not being right-wing enough.
In what may be the most frustrating news to come out of a very infuriating election cycle, Politico describes the reasons why the GOP’s mega-donors and heavy hitters are afraid of launching a wave of attack ads. Only 4 percent of the $238 million in advertising spent by big-money groups so far has targeted Trump. One reason is sheer cowardice (they’re afraid Trump might hit back). But another reason is that previous ads didn’t work.
But these ads are practically designed not to work, because they only reinforce Trump’s message. The ads either decry Trump for being politically incorrect, or describe him as not a traditional conservative. Both things are precisely his appeal, and both boil down to “He’s not one of the guys you hate.” The ads are saying: “All those reasons you like Trump? They’re really true!”
The reason why Trump shouldn’t be president, fundamentally, is not his position (or lack thereof) on this or that issue. Trump doesn’t care about the border wall or ObamaCare (whatever his position on it is this week). The reason Trump shouldn’t be president is because he’s probably a sociopath.
So this is what the attack ads should focus on. The ads should focus on what people like about him, and invert it. As Ross Douthat put it in a column last month:
So don’t tell people that he doesn’t know the difference between Kurds and the Quds Force. (They don’t either!) Tell people that he isn’t the incredible self-made genius that he plays on TV. Tell them about all the money he inherited from his daddy. Tell them about the bailouts that saved him from ruin. Tell them about all his cratered companies. Then find people who suffered from those fiascos — workers laid off following his bankruptcies, homeowners who bought through Trump Mortgage, people who ponied up for sham degrees from Trump University. (…) If you want to persuade his voters that his “New York values” are a problem for them, put his alleged dealings with the Mafia on the table. [The New York Times]
Would these ads work? Well, they just might work enough to puncture his aura of inevitability and maybe, just maybe, keep his ceiling low enough to allow a non-Trump candidate to break through. They sure as heck would work better than doing nothing.
If not now, we’ll find out how well they work once Trump has the nomination locked up and Hillary Clinton starts airing them.
By: Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, The Week, February 26, 2016
“Donald Trump — Man Of War”: Do The Trumpeteers Actually Listen, Thoughtfully And Carefully, To What Trump Says?
We should all give thanks to Donald Trump’s reality-TV-show run for the Republican presidential nomination because of what it reveals about his fan base.
Assuming Trump’s supporters have actually listened to what the narcissistic real estate developer has been saying, what they want is multiple ground wars, an America that steals from other countries, an America that kills people because of their religion, and a massive police state constantly checking people (especially Hispanics and Latinos) to determine whether they’re undocumented and should be arrested and deported, and even have their citizenship taken away.
These Trumpeteers evidently want a president who believes his duties include humiliating anyone who asks questions he wishes had not been asked or whose business decisions he dislikes.
On a personal level, they want a president whose family values included years of keeping a mistress, Marla Maples, and who, after not having marital relations with his wife for more than 16 months, flew into a rage, tore hair from her head, and allegedly violated her sexually. Ivana Trump, after her testimony came out, said she did not mean “rape” in the sense that her husband should be prosecuted for a crime, but she has never wavered otherwise from her description of that violent bedroom assault.
Trump also abandoned his daughter with Maples, providing financial support but not much more, according to the girl’s mother. (If anyone has photos of Trump and daughter Tiffany taken in the last year, please send them to davidcay@me.com.)
The Trumpeteers also want a president whose own words indicate he is at times delusional, seeing demon-like changes in the face of Fox News personality Megyn Kelly. Her calm visage was visible to anyone watching the debate, yet Trump has said repeatedly that “everyone” saw Kelly become so visibly angry she had “blood coming from her eyes.”
Of course all of these observations rest on the assumption that the Trumpeteers actually listen, thoughtfully and carefully, to what Trump says — and that they understand our Constitution.
Trump has sold himself like a bottle of Coke – all fizz and fun with no substance. And my fellow journalists at the five major newspapers, the major broadcast outlets, and other news organizations have failed to vet the candidate — with minor and tepid exceptions.
The Donald’s marital violence has gotten some mention, for example, but with an emphasis on obfuscations by him and her fudging on the word “rape.”
Likewise, his extensive ties to the biggest Mafia figures in New York and Atlantic City, his history of cheating workers and vendors, and other unsavory aspects of his biography go largely unreported. I laid these out in an earlier National Memo column, but the major news organizations have tended to ignore skeletons in Trump’s closet — again there are exceptions, namely Michael Smerconish on CNN; Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC.
Trump gets a free ride because it’s cheap and easy to cover what candidates say, but takes actual work to examine what they have done. And work costs more.
Let’s start with war-mongering, because if Trump gets his finger on the button, that is exactly what we will get – not just a war, but multiple wars. He says we must have American troops on the ground in Iran, Iraq, and the “Islamic State” in parts of Syria and Iraq. This also means vast occupying armies, though Trump never mentions this fact and journalists fail to ask about that necessary step, if we are to steal the oil and install puppet regimes.
Trump has been urging war for almost 30 years. On Meet the Press in 1987, he said we should use the firing of a single bullet as a reason to invade Iran, seize its oil, and, as he put it, “let them have the rest” of their country.
As a presidential candidate, Trump has said he stands by those remarks and added that he wants American troops to invade the Middle East both to suppress the religious government emerging in parts of Syria and Iraq and to steal oil.
“I am the most militaristic person there is,” Trump proudly declared Aug. 10 on Morning Joe.
This assurance comes from a man who assiduously avoided the Vietnam-era draft, ultimately claiming “minor” bone spurs made him 4-F, though his accounts raise questions about his fidelity to facts. Trump has also said he opposed the Vietnam War, so his promotion of war as policy came only when other young men faced hostile bullets.
Trump has long walked with a bodyguard or two, and has an aversion to shaking hands with other people. (I have seen him go immediately wash his hands after he had no choice but to grip another person’s hand.)
Trump claims he speaks plainly, but he never says he wants to “steal” oil from other countries. Instead, Trump has repeatedly said over the last four years that America should “take the oil” of sovereign nations. In this context “take” and “steal” are synonymous.
Trump is not alone among Republican candidates in favoring another ground war in the Middle East — explicitly a religious war, waged against a modern caliphate (a theocratic government run by a presumed successor to the Prophet Muhammad).
For example, John Kasich, the Ohio governor who is always reminding us of his Christianity, also wants a ground war for the explicit purpose of destroying the emerging caliphate.
As with Trump’s preposterous claim that he can make Mexico pay for an impenetrable wall along the U.S. border, he shows no respect for the fact that Earth has about 200 sovereign nations. Instead he sees other countries as subservient to America and promises to dispatch ground troops wherever he thinks a country needs to be brought to heel.
Trump also seems unaware that no wealthy country has ever managed to keep ambitious poor people from entering it legally or otherwise, a lesson the Romans learned long ago.
His plans would require vast increases in government spending. So why do self-identified conservative Republicans, who want to pay less in taxes and enjoy a smaller government, favor his plans?
Creating a smaller government and lowering taxes is logically inconsistent with waging multiple wars while rounding up and deporting people who either entered the country illegally or stayed after their visas expired.
The long-term costs of more ground wars in the Middle East would run into the trillions of dollars with bills coming due well into the 22nd century as pensioners, widows, and the disabled children of veterans collect benefits for probably many decades after everyone old enough to read this is dead.
Worse, these unnecessary wars of plunder are likely to turn allies and nominal allies into enemies, inviting even more wars and, thus, more costs. America would be seen not as a beacon of liberty and opportunity, but a selfish, thieving, and dangerous pariah state.
The taxpayer cost for rounding up anyone perceived as an illegal immigrant could well be $200 billion. On top of that, there would be disruptions to business — adding billions more to the nation’s tab. And that doesn’t take into account the human cost of turning America into a police state where people turn in neighbors, perhaps for financial rewards or to avoid prosecution for misprision of a felony.
So yes, we should be thankful to Trump. His campaign is revealing just how many people in this country want America to become a modern Sparta, run by a president who demonizes others, wants to limit their personal conduct, seeks to control business decisions, and supports a massive expansion of the police powers of the state — which includes building a wall that will not keep people from coming to America uninvited.
What Trump’s rise in the polls tells us is that many Americans have no idea what our Constitution says, and wrongly believe that sovereignty is only for America. They do not know, or care, that the men who founded this country believed in the common defense, but never in attacking other countries, especially not to steal.
Of course all this assumes the Trumpeteers have actually thought through the reasons they support Trump, and have taken the time to understand what he has said and what he has done. Let us hope for the sake of our liberty and peace that is a wrong assumption.
By: David Cay Johnston, Featured Post, The National Memo, August 22, 2015
Should Rep. Peter King Investigate The Catholic Church?
Rep. Peter King, the Long Island congressman who for years supported the Irish Republican Army as it waged a terror campaign to eject the British from Northern Ireland, says that track record has no bearing on his controversial decision to hold hearings this week on what he calls the “radicalization” of Islam in America.
The two examples are different, he argues, and the main reason is that unlike radical Muslims, the I.R.A. never launched attacks in the United States. (That made sense, since Irish-Americans were sending crucial material support to the I.R.A.)
“I understand why people who are misinformed might see a parallel. The fact is, the I.R.A. never attacked the United States. And my loyalty is to the United States,” King, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told The New York Times.
Okay, so how about investigating the Roman Catholic Church, another religious community — like Islam — and one to which the Irish-Catholic congressman also professes great loyalty?
As Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen pointed out on Tuesday, if Congress is going to start investigating religious groups whose members have attacked Americans, that could be bad news for the Catholic Church given the extent of the clergy sexual abuse scandal. (And Cohen’s piece was published hours before the latest shocker, the mass suspension of 21 priests in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia following a grand jury probe — the second since 2005 — of the sexual abuse of children by clergy in the city.)
Bill Donohue of the Catholic League jumped on Cohen — as is his wont — for citing an exaggerated figure of 100,000 possible victims of clergy abuse, noting, correctly, that the figure is more like 12,000 (though this crime is notoriously under reported). Donohue did not, however, dispute Cohen’s central premise about the problematic nature of King’s investigation of Islam, and a toll of thousands of children abused over five decades is hardly what the lawyers might call exculpatory evidence.
Little wonder that former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, a Republican, onetime FBI agent and federal prosecutor, and devout Catholic, likened some bishops to the Mafia when he was named in 2002 to be the first head of a lay oversight board to keep the hierarchy honest in its abuse-prevention policies.
Such characterizations got Keating forced out by the bishops after a year in the post, and his resignation letter still minced no words: “To resist grand jury subpoenas, to suppress the names of offending clerics, to deny, to obfuscate, to explain away; that is the model of a criminal organization, not my church.”
Of course, a congressional investigation of the Catholic Church would be met with howls of protests from the likes of Donohue and most certainly Peter King, and rightly so.
The point is that the religious community that Muslims today most clearly resemble is the Roman Catholic Church, and it was thus as recently as King’s own youth, when John F. Kennedy barely won election due to concerns that one could not be a “good Catholic” and a “good American.”
Indeed, during the campaign Kennedy famously had to assure Protestant pastors that he would never take orders from the Vatican (a pronouncement many conservative Christians today now hold against Kennedy and his Catholic heirs in the Democratic Party — sometimes you can’t win for losing).
King’s hearing set for Thursday has been compared to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, while others speculated that they would be akin to holding congressional hearings on the role of Christianity in promoting violence against gays or abortion providers.
But the Islamic-Catholic analogy is most apt.
Like Muslims in America today, Catholics were seen as foreign-born immigrants who were subject to a foreign ruler, namely the Pope in Rome, who did not recognize religious freedom and democratic governance.
The latter charges were actually true, more or less, until the reforms of the 1960s, though American Catholics took little notice of such teachings, much as American Muslims would stare blankly if asked about the latest fatwa from some imam in Iran.
(In 1928, New York Gov. Al Smith, the first Catholic nominated as a presidential candidate, was challenged by a prominent Episcopal layman to explain how he could expect to uphold the Constitution if elected while at the same time accepting the teaching in papal encyclicals. “What the hell is an encyclical?” Smith reportedly asked. He still got creamed by Herbert Hoover.)
During the 19th century a major political party was founded to combat Catholic influence, and Catholic students were unable to attend public schools without having to imbibe Protestant teachings. Catholics were subject to outbursts of popular violence, and when the pope donated a stone for the construction of the Washington Monument in 1854, an anti-Catholic mob threw it into the Potomac River. Thomas Nast’s famous 1875 cartoon, “The American River Ganges,” showed St. Peter’s Basilica in the background with mitred Catholic bishops as crocodiles attacking the United States to devour the nation’s schoolchildren.
Such sentiments were all too common, as were efforts — as Paul Moses noted in Commonweal magazine — to stop the construction of Catholic churches in U.S. cities, almost a mirror image of the fierce arguments last year against construction of the so-called “ground zero” mosque, also known as the Islamic center in Lower Manhattan.
It was King, in fact, who had a key role in fomenting opposition to the Islamic center, saying early last year that it was “particularly offensive” because “so many Muslim leaders have failed to speak out against radical Islam, against the attacks” of 9/11.
Those arguments laid the ground work for King’s subsequent charges that American Muslims and their leaders are not cooperating with authorities to thwart terrorist plots and that 80 percent of mosques in America are controlled by radical imams. Even though King has provided no evidence for the charges — and the latest research counters his claims — he is going ahead with a hearing to “test” his hypothesis.
King continued his line of argumentation on the eve of the hearing, telling the Associated Press that radical Islam is a distinct threat that must be investigated regardless of whose sensibilities are offended.
“You have a violent enemy from overseas which threatens us and which is recruiting people from a community living in our country,” King said. He could have been talking about his own Catholic community in the 1800s.
It is also interesting to note that Catholics often reacted to such denigration by trying to prove they were more patriotic than the Founding Fathers which, as Notre Dame church historians R. Scott Appleby and John T. McGreevy have pointed out, sometimes led to excesses like Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist hearings of the 1950s.
That’s a historical parallel Peter King may also want to remember.
By: David Gibson, Religion Reporter, Politics Daily, March 9, 2011
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