“What The GOP Gets Wrong About ISIS”: The Positions Staked Out By Republican Politicians Are Crazy
As we come to the end of a year of terror—actually, of horror—and we enter a year of terrible campaigning by some horrible candidates for the presidency of the United States, one might wish the Republican front-runners would step back from the path of religious zealotry, racist paranoia and torture envy. But … no.
As the debates in mid-December and the sparring since have showed us, they are detached from many realities, but especially the reality on the ground in Syria, which I have been covering first-hand with frequent trips there since 2012.
So, now, back in the United States, I watch in consternation the nauseating spin about Radical Islam, carpet bombing, waterboarding, surveillance of everyone, blaming refugees. The Republican “strategies” for dealing with the so-called Islamic State sound like a laundry list of the monumental failures from the 9/11 decade.
Was it “political correctness” that knocked down the twin towers and kidnapped and tortured my friends? No, it was something much more sinister, and something much more sophisticated than these candidates seem to realize, or to be.
There is a reason, of course, for them to deflect questions about military tactics against ISIS. There are no easy answers, and even the difficult options are severely limited. No realistic proposal for tackling the jihadi group will play well with primary voters and all of the candidates know it. Presumably, this is why the Republican candidates have taken the discussion into the realm of paranoid fantasy and insinuation, where they seem much more comfortable.
Consider Donald Trump’s bizarre statement that “we should be able to penetrate the Internet and find out exactly where ISIS is.” Actually, we know exactly where the Islamic State is and have a good idea of where its main bastions are. We essentially already know what is needed to fight them.
The problem is that no matter how good our intel is, there is still the pesky issue of how to take and hold territory, which is a costly proposition. And while ISIS potentate Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi recently conceded he’s been losing ground, but gradually, he figures that, up against the disorganization of his enemies, and the U.S. presidential campaign is a prime example of that, he will be able to get it back—and then some.
Then there’s the question of torture, or “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and the notion that they could have prevented the Paris attacks in November that killed 130 people.
At a Council on Foreign Relations event Chris Christie said “it’s not a coincidence to me that this happened in the aftermath of restricting these programs and remember also demoralizing the intelligence community. That awful report that came out from the Senate Democrats at the end of last year was a complete political instrument that did nothing more than demoralize American intelligence officers all around the world.”
Using religious language like “Radical Islam” has also been touted as a Republican “strategy” for some time. Such words, one way or the other, have zero effect on the ground.
Ted Cruz’s anti-ISIS strategy is to rename the terror group, which results in a meaningless sound bite, not a strategy. You can rebrand a cancer however you like; the threat it poses will be unchanged. But the “Radical Islam” rhetoric plays well into a broader trend of advocating racial, ethnic and religious profiling by the general public. Cruz’s followers do not hear the word “radical,” as any spin doctor knows. They cut straight to “Islam” as the threat.
When asked if the American government should engaging in profiling, Jeb Bush’s answer was concrete and definitive: “Yeah, absolutely, that is what screening is. We should be profiling. Of course we should. This is Islamic terrorism. The Democrats have no clue about this, or they refuse to call it what it is. These are Islamic terrorists that are trying to take out our country and destroy Western civilization. If you start with that premise, which I think the great majority of Americans believe, then you have a totally different approach on how you deal with it.”
Yet when asked about his military strategy, Bush replied with a platitude: “The main thing we should be focused on is a strategy to defeat ISIS…. Leading the world, funding [the military] to make sure we have a military that is second to none and doing the job.”
When Republicans rally so strongly behind the anti-refugee hysteria, torture and religious rhetoric, it is because they need unifying issues that allow them to attack President Barack Obama and, by extension, Hillary Clinton.
According to Robert Y. Shapiro, a professor of government at Columbia University, the refugee issue is a convenient tool used by the GOP to criticize the Obama administration without confronting military realities.
“I think they want to keep the focus on the refugees since, first, they are a reminder of Obama’s perceived failure against the Syrian government and the conquests of ISIS,” says Shapiro. “Second, they are a reminder of the potential terrorist threat which is an issue on which the Republicans, since George W. Bush, have had the high ground over the Democrats. The current polls strongly reflect this.”
“It is a way of avoiding the tougher issue of what to do about Syria and ISIS,” says Shapiro. The political strategy keeps the focus on the the failings of the Obama administration and its longtime secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.
If there is one thing Republicans agree on, in fact, it is that Obama somehow created ISIS. Yet when it comes to exactly why they think that, the reasons are vastly different and completely contradictory.
So, for instance, former New York (9/11) Mayor Rudy Giuliani said in a recent Fox News interview that he believes ISIS is an “Obama creation.” According to Giuliani, ISIS rose to prominence because Obama refused to implement a no fly zone over Syria after the Assad regime’s chemical weapon attacks in 2013.
According to Trump, however, ISIS is a result of Obama’s weak personality and his intervention in Libya, which Trump says destabilized the region. Trump has also claimed that he believes Obama may have directly armed ISIS, and that America should support Russia’s intervention in Syria.
According to Ted Cruz, political correctness is to blame and Obama should try to ramp up the religious rhetoric.
According to Jeb Bush, ISIS is Obama’s fault because he drew down U.S. forces in Iraq, allowing the jihadis to fill the vacuum.
Rand Paul insists that Obama “armed the allies of ISIS.”
On the far-out fringes of the right (whose votes are coveted as well) there are the persistent conspiracy theories that Obama is a secret member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that moderate Republican Sen. John McCain met with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, when he visited Syria.
If Obama is a dictatorial warmonger, a secret jihadi or, as Christie puts it, “a feckless weakling,” what Republican could come to his defense?
Yet none can say that Obama is not striking ISIS, because he is. GOP candidates cannot say that Obama has overstepped his executive authority, because this would be interpreted as opposition to the military campaign. The Republican candidates cannot advocate sending in ground troops, because that is an unelectable position.
No one is going to make waves by advocating a no-fly zone, because Hillary Clinton has been the most vocal advocate of an air exclusion area since the beginning of the conflict, long before any Republican candidates raised the issue.
Four years of contradictory statements and shortsighted posturing from the GOP with regard to Syria have made emotionally charged peripheral issues the safest bet when it comes to politicizing ISIS.
A review of Republican positions since the conflict began reveals broad opposition to Obama’s anti-Assad-regime plans and serious criticism of his executive actions against ISIS.
In 2014, John Boehner was quick to criticize Obama’s military actions as unauthorized, but became visibly uncomfortable when asked why he didn’t introduce an authorization to use military force. Numerous Republicans dissented when Obama said he intended to retaliate against the Assad regime for chemical attacks in 2013, and were largely responsible for staying his hand. With regard to military action against ISIS, many Republicans chose to avoid a vote on the subject so they could assess the success of the campaign before risking a position. This is hard to spin as a courageous stance against the Islamic State.
Before the Paris attacks and the current anti-refugee hysteria, the Republican contenders, especially Cruz, had focused their criticism of Obama on the fact that he refuses to equate the Islamic State with mainstream Islam. This is clever, up to a point, because it is vague and draws on a widely held belief among conservatives that political correctness and cultural sensitivity are largely to blame for their unhappiness. Thus Cruz proclaimed, incongruously, “It is not a lack of competence that is preventing the Obama adminstration from stopping these attacks it is political correctness.”
Do the candidates really believe what they are saying about refugees? It is important to listen to the specific words that they and governors opposed to resettlement have been using.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie knows that his biggest weakness is being perceived as soft on Obama, because he worked closely with the president after Hurricane Sandy. In interview after interview, Christie has deflected questions on his refugee scapegoating back to Obama, stating that he does not trust the President to vet the refugees.
During the GOP debates in Las Vegas Christie focused heavily on his involvement with minor terrorism cases as a prosecutor and the fact that he lived in New Jersey on 9/11.
Ted Cruz keeps the focus on buzzwords meant to energize his evangelical base. In a single interview with Sean Hannity, he repeated the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” 19 times. And since the Paris attacks, Cruz has also been sure to repeat the words “tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees” verbatim several times per interview.
Despite all the tough talk none of this rhetoric comes close to resembling a strategy, which is why the GOP has more to lose than anyone from a real debate on military tactics against ISIS.
The fear mongering has been successful turning conservatives against a vulnerable community that had no role in the Paris or San Bernardino attacks. According to a Yougov poll, support for accepting refugees has dropped from 39 percent among Republicans in early September to 17 percent now. The major GOP contenders need issues like refugees and religion to stay in the conversation because they have no clue how to beat ISIS.
In fact, the threat does not come from Obama, refugees, and civil rights, as opposed to from the actual Islamic State. The Republicans give the overall impression that they would increase U.S. military operation and that the Obama administration has no clear strategy. ‘In fact the Obama administration does,” say Shapiro “but it is a much slower long term one… leaving the fighting on the ground to the Kurds and Iraqi forces.”
Most of the actual proposals presented by GOP candidates are basically just variations on that theme.
On the ground in Syria, debates among the Republican candidates have sounded unrealistic if not surreal. It is obvious that ISIS can only be beaten through intelligent alliances and precise military planning. This should not be a great mystery given the fact that ISIS has been beaten before. In early 2014 Syrian rebels forced ISIS into a massive retreat from Aleppo province. I personally had the privilege of visiting parts of Aleppo that were recently liberated. This objective was achieved through military coordination among rebels factions who took heavy casualties.
It’s strange to hear politicians speak about ISIS as though it is some mysterious threat that will require America to change its identity. The leaders and fighters of ISIS are simply human beings, and in battle, they die.
When I hear politicians demonize Syrians and Muslims or advocate torture and carpet bombing, it shows how deep their lack of commitment to the actual fight is.
Syrians are the only people I have ever encountered who have actually stood up to and beaten back ISIS. The 2014 rebel offensive was the most significant blow that ISIS has ever been dealt and it didn’t magically occur when Ted Cruz uttered the words “Radical Islam.” It certainly didn’t come from preventing desperate refugees from settling in America. The biggest defeat ISIS has ever suffered came from Syrians who are the exact same religion and nationality that candidates like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are so determined to turn into an enemy.
By: Patrick Hilsman, The Daily Beast, December 28, 2015
“There’s One Big Reason We’re Being Radicalized”: America, Look At What Donald Trump Is Doing To Us
During Saturday night’s Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton declared that Trump is “becoming ISIS’s best recruiter.” Clinton was wrong to suggest Trump had appeared in any ISIS videos but she was right to note that his words will help ISIS radicalize people.
She also left something out: Trump has already radicalized Americans to commit and plot acts of violence right here on American soil.
The latest example came Sunday after William Celli of Richmond, California, was arrested for building explosive devices that he allegedly planned to use to kill Muslim Americans. What inspired Celli’s actions? Well, we know that Celli’s Facebook page reads like a Trump speech filled with anti-immigrant, anti-Latino and anti-Muslim comments. Celli also repeatedly praises Trump, even adding that he would follow Trump “to the end of the world.” This is not unlike social media posts pledging undying loyalty to ISIS-type groups.
But Celli is far from the only Trump supporter to turn to violence. In August, two Trump supporters in Boston beat up a Latino man while yelling anti-immigrant slurs. The police reported that after being arrested, one of the assailants stated, “Donald Trump was right. All these illegals need to be deported.”
Trump’s response to this brutal attack in his name was alarmingly tame: “I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate.” He added, “They love this country, they want this country to be great again.” Trump did later tweet that the incident was horrible and that “I would never condone violence.”
But just three months later, Trump changed his tune and did condone violence by his supporters. During a campaign event in Birmingham, Alabama, Black Lives Matter protester Mercurito Southhall Jr. repeatedly interrupted The Donald. Trump responded by imploring the crowd to “Get him out the hell out of here… Throw him out!” Trump supporters then sprung into action and beat up Southhall while reportedly calling him a “nigger” and a “monkey.”
Did Trump condemn the attack and racist words directed at the black man by his white supporters? No, to the contrary. Trump told Fox News the morning after the assault, “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”
Trump was sending a clear message that violence in the name of Trump was acceptable. I know some will disagree with me, but the stakes are too high to be politically correct. Trump has and will continue to radicalize people to commit horrible acts just like ISIS does. True, the scope of the violence commited by ISIS supporters has been far worse but if Celli’s bomb had gone off and he’d slaughtered Americans, it would have been exactly like an ISIS-inspired terror attack.
And apart from these three incidents, Trump’s rhetoric about Muslims is responsible, to some degree, for the massive spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes we have seen in the last few weeks.
In recent years, there has been an average of 12.6 hate crimes against Muslims in America per month, according to FBI data. However, since the Paris terrorist attack on Nov. 13 there have been 38 anti-Islamic attacks.
A few examples include a Muslim cab driver in Pittsburgh being shot by a man who went on an anti-Muslim tirade, shots fired at a Muslim woman’s car while exiting a mosque in Florida, hot coffee thrown at a Muslim praying in a California park, and death threats directed at numerous Muslim leaders including Rep. Andre Carson, one of the two Muslim members in Congress.
And we have also seen a rash of attacks on American mosques in the past two weeks, with windows broken at the Islamic center in Palm Beach, a pig’s head thrown at a mosque in Philadelphia, hate-filled, threatening letters sent to a mosque in New Jersey, and more.
Are all these hate crimes due to Trump’s alarming rhetoric in recent weeks about Muslims, from vowing to close mosques to banning all Muslims from entering America? No. But there’s absolutely no doubt his words play a role in ginning up fears and legitimizing hate. It’s akin to the hateful fear-mongering by Southern Democrats in the 1950s and ’60s directed against blacks that then led to violence against blacks and their white allies.
Keep in mind that after the 2013 Boston marathon bombing that left three dead and over 250 injured, we didn’t see anything like this level of anti-Muslim hate crimes. As the Associated Press noted in a detailed article published a few weeks after the Boston bombing, “Muslim civil rights leaders say the anti-Islam reaction has been more muted this time than after other attacks since Sept. 11.” And Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told the AP reporter then that there had been “no uptick in reports of harassment, assaults or damage to mosques since the April 15 bombings.”
What is the difference between 2013 and now? Simple: Donald J. Trump. After the Boston bombing, leading political figures weren’t actively ratcheting up hate toward Muslims. But that is exactly what Trump has been doing. Trump’s proposals regarding Muslims aren’t about enacting policies, they are about sending the message that all Muslims are a danger to our nation.
Even after nearly 3,000 Americas were killed as a result of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush did the exact opposite of what we are seeing from Trump. Bush, while addressing Congress two weeks after that horrific terror attack, stated: “I also want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world. We respect your faith… Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah.”
What a contrast to what we now hear from Trump. This is truly the first time in my life that I have been fearful for the safety of my Muslim American family members and friends. And I’m far from alone in that feeling within the Muslim American community.
Is this what Trump means when he says he wants to make America great again? I’m not sure, but it appears that many of his supporters alarmingly believe that’s exactly what Trump means.
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, December 22, 2015
“GOP Take Heed”: Donald Trump Is The GOP’s George Wallace
Tuesday night, following the fourth Republican presidential primary debate, the pundit class will dutifully declare Marco Rubio the winner, extolling his debate prowess with the usual breathlessness. And then, the overnight polls will find that once again, Donald Trump has won the night (with Washington GOP bête noir Ted Cruz likely coming in second), and establishment GOP heads will explode again.
The Trump phenomenon might feel both interminable and unprecedented to Republican elites, but of course it isn’t. American populist politics has a long tradition, from Andrew Jackson to Huey Long to Joseph McCarthy. But the politician Trump is most like could be George Wallace. And if the rumors of an establishment plot to somehow prevent the current frontrunner from getting the nomination are true, Trump could wind up as the GOP’s Wallace in more than just style and bluster.
Back in Wallace’s day, it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were bedeviled by their extremist flank. The Southern wing of the party was in full rebellion over the push for racial integration in schools and public accommodations; over the civil rights laws pushed through by a majority Democratic congress with the help of Republicans and an apostate Southern Democratic president; and even over the war in Vietnam, which drew a spirited investigation by ardent segregationist Sen. William Fulbright of Arkansas.
Wallace ran for Alabama governor in 1958 touting his ability to “to treat a man fair, regardless of his color.” He lost and vowed to “never be out-niggered again.” He ran for governor in 1962, this time as a hard-line segregationist, and won. The new George Wallace was a political thespian, dramatically “tossing the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny” on behalf of the “great Anglo Saxon Southland” and declaring “segregation now and segregation forever.” He staged his “stand in” at the entrance of the University of Alabama in June of 1963 to dramatize the fruitless fight to keep two black students, and their armed federal escorts, out; and ran his soon-to-be ailing wife, Lurleen, for governor when the Democratic state legislature refused to let him vie for a second term.
In 1966, Wallace declared his independence from the political establishment, calling himself “an Alabama Democrat, not a national Democrat,” and adding: “I’m not kin to those folks. The difference between a national Democrat and an Alabama Democrat is like the difference between a Communist and a non-Communist.” He commiserated with conservative white voters, saying both major parties have “looked down their nose at you and me a long time. They’ve called us rednecks—the Republicans and the Democrats. Well, we’re going to show there sure are a lot of rednecks in this country.”
When he ran for president as an independent in 1968, Wallace did so as a pure populist, capitalizing on a segment of the electorate’s disdain for traditional politicians.
His campaign focused on law and order in the face of hundreds of riots in 1967. He declared it a “sad day in our country that you cannot walk even in your neighborhoods at night or even in the daytime because both national parties, in the last number of years, have kowtowed to every group of anarchists that have roamed the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles and throughout the country.”
He zeroed in on white working-class voters’ anxieties over the decline of traditional values, deriding the Supreme Court for promoting a “perverted agenda” that ripped prayer from public schools while concocting a right to “distribute obscene pornography.” He lamented the inordinate amount of time Washington elites spent pandering to communistic black civil rights scoundrels and “welfare cheats” while prying into the affairs of the common white man who just wanted to run his business as he saw fit or sell his home to someone with “blue eyes and green skin” via restrictive covenant if he so chose.
Like Trump, Wallace rose steadily and improbably in the polls, with consistently high ratings for “saying it the way it really is” and “standing by his convictions.” New Republic columnist Richard Strout in 1967 dubbed Wallace “the ablest demagogue of our time, with a voice of venom and a gut knowledge of the prejudices of the low-income class.” Even John Wayne donated to his campaign, which raised most of its money through small donations.
By December 1967, Wallace made Gallup’s list of America’s 10 most admired men, at No. 8, one notch above California Gov. Ronald Reagan. Gallup would later note that Wallace’s support was strongest among those “with a high school background or less” and those who strongly disliked President Lyndon Johnson.
Wallace ran in some Democratic primaries, as he had briefly in 1964. But; his segregationist views had become an anathema to the party of LBJ, and he got almost no votes. Instead he accepted the nomination of the new, far-right American Independent Party, and he chose retired General Curtis LeMay, who wanted to nuke Vietnam, as his running mate.
Though his principal strength was in the South, Wallace also held large and raucous campaign rallies up North; drawing 20,000 people to Madison Square Garden in October 1968, as anti-Wallace protesters clashed with police outside. One Wallace strategist, arch-segregationist John J. Synon, boasted of Wallace’s Northern supporters in a 1967 column: “Who faced down M.L. King in Cicero, last summer [by throwing bottles and bricks at black civil rights activists who marched through the all-white Illinois town]; who takes the brunt whenever there is trouble? Blue collars, that’s who.”
Wallace’s campaign rallies were characterized by intermittent spasms of violence, including in New York, where several of his supporters notoriously surrounded a group of black protesters and began chanting “kill ’em! Kill ’em!” And Wallace, like Trump, seemed to encourage their bravado, declaring at Madison Square Garden: “We don’t have riots in Alabama. They start a riot down there, first one of ’em to pick up a brick gets a bullet in the brain, that’s all. And then you walk over to the next one and say, ‘All right, pick up a brick. We just want to see you pick up one of them bricks now.”
In the end, Wallace’s independent presidential run took more votes from Richard Nixon than from Hubert Humphrey—four out of five Wallace votes would have gone to Nixon were Wallace not in the race, pollsters concluded at the time, and Nixon won by fewer than 1 million votes, while Wallace pulled 9.9 million. Wallace won five states in the Deep South, along with more Electoral College votes, at 46, than any third-party candidate before or since (one “faithless elector” in North Carolina stubbornly cast a vote for Wallace over that state’s victor, Nixon). The results prompted Nixon campaign strategist Kevin Phillips in 1969 to devise the “Southern strategy” to capitalize on Wallace’s popularity with disaffected conservative white voters in the South.
By 1972, it was Nixon and the Republicans who would never be “out-niggered again.”
Wallace ran twice more for president, both times as a Democrat. He finished a close third to George McGovern and Humphrey in the 1972 primary and came in third again in 1976, behind Jerry Brown and Jimmy Carter. But he was returning to a party he had helped break, by accelerating the realignment of the two major parties that began in 1964. Wallace never came close to being president, but his 1968 bid helped kill the New Deal coalition of black and white working-class voters. The Democratic Party was forever changed.
Which brings us to the Republican Party in 2016.
If their George Wallace—Donald Trump—wins the nomination, the party’s die is cast with a message that’s doomed among the increasingly multiracial presidential-year electorate. If he loses but his opponents continue to pander, self-protectively, to the most hateful aspects of Trump’s message, that die is cast anyway.
If he loses, particularly through some convention gamesmanship, and his supporters decide he was robbed of the nomination by a party elite who looked down on him, and on them, Trump could launch a third-party effort of Wallace-like proportions and tear the GOP in two. And that, in the end, is what Republican elites fear most.
By: Joy-Ann Reid, The Daily Beast, December 15, 2015
“Not The Worldview Of Most Americans”: Donald Trump Ushers In A New Era Of Pitchfork Populism
Donald Trump became the driving force in U.S. politics by giving voice to anger, fear and resentment that were already there, just below the surface, waiting for their moment and messenger.
At present, Trump’s target is any believer in Islam who seeks to enter the United States. Back in June, he launched his campaign with invective toward any Latino immigrant living in this country without documents. He attacks President Obama less for his policies than for his identity — not for what the president does but for who he is. Trump has made himself the champion of a fading, embattled “us” in a life-or-death struggle against a swarming, threatening “them.”
The blustery billionaire’s “us” is nowhere near a majority of the U.S. electorate, but it might be enough to win him the Republican nomination for president. And even if he falls short, the forces he has loosed will not easily be tamped down.
Trump’s rally Monday in Mount Pleasant, S.C., was a lesson in what his campaign is really about. Just hours earlier, he had issued a statement saying all Muslims should be barred entry to the United States in light of the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorist rampage. The subtext was clear: All Muslims are potential terrorists. We have to keep them out.
Some commentators pronounced, for the umpteenth time, that “Trump has finally gone too far.” But the Mount Pleasant crowd apparently thought otherwise.
“I wrote something today that I think is very very salient, very important and probably not politically correct, but I don’t care,” Trump said. Then he read his no-Muslims statement and the crowd responded with a huge, raucous ovation.
And Muslims were not his only target at that rally. He railed at the journalists covering the event, pointing them out at the back of the room and calling them “scum” for supposedly never showing how big his crowds are. He also focused the crowd’s attention on Black Lives Matter protesters in the back of the room, declaring that they should be ejected but treated gently.
Trump’s audience in Mount Pleasant appeared to be overwhelmingly white. If it mirrored his support base in the polls, it was also older and less educated than the Republican electorate as a whole. A vastly wealthy tycoon who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and lives in a Manhattan penthouse has somehow become the unlikely spokesman for a segment of voters who feel most threatened by what the nation has become.
Demographic change means that whites will no longer be the majority by the middle of the century. When you call the electric company to pay a bill, you’re asked to push as a button “ para continuar en español .” Incomes are stagnant except for those at the very top; manufacturing jobs are gone; and if you don’t have a college degree, you’re trapped on the wrong side of the wall between middle-class comfort and lower-class misery.
To add insult to injury, serving his second term as president is a black man who was educated at Ivy League schools and whose father was a Muslim. For Trump’s supporters, it is hard to imagine a more perfect target for fear and loathing.
The people at Trump’s rallies do not necessarily believe he will do all the things he promises. Is it really possible to round up and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants? Will Mexico really pay for building an impenetrable wall along the border? Is it legally or practically feasible to identify and turn back every Muslim seeking entry to the country? Is a pledge to “bomb the s—” out of the Islamic State any different from what Obama is already doing or any more likely to prevent another terrorist attack?
It’s not that Trump will do the impossible, it’s that he might do something .
Trump gives unfiltered voice to the anger and frustration some Americans feel. When he says he refuses to be “politically correct,” what he means is that he rejects the traditional constraints of public discourse. He doesn’t chastise his supporters for racism, nativism or religious bigotry; instead, he validates such views, bringing them out of the closet where they had been hiding.
Whatever happens to Trump’s candidacy, he has exposed a kind of rage that we haven’t seen in many years. His pitchfork populism is not the worldview of most Americans, to be sure. But it is likely to remain a significant political force — even if the Republican establishment somehow quashes the Trump rebellion.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 10, 2015
“The Imposter Syndrome”: The Profound Insecurity Of Donald Trump
It is a mistake of historians and biographers to ascribe to a person one particular motive force, and then attribute every subsequent action of theirs to that personality trait. In politics, we compound this error by insisting that politicians act only or primarily because they want to get re-elected.
But boy, if persistent and deep insecurity doesn’t push Donald Trump towards those microphones, I don’t know what does. I don’t think it’s narcissism.
Now, of course we all suffer from imposter syndrome, which is the fear that our true level of capability will be exposed and our ability to BS our way out of tough situations will only get us so far.
But Trump has got it really bad.
1. He regularly and repeatedly insists that he is the most brilliant person, has the best memory, the greatest ideas; people who are relatively secure do not need to tell others that they are great, but people who are not secure have to cover a 10-foot gap with a 100-foot bridge, so afraid are they that what they actually have to say is exposing some fundamental flaw. Trump’s use of superlatives belies a rather profound sadness. He desperately NEEDS you to know that he is right.
2. Forget about the financial braggadocio; Trump insists he’s smart because he went to Wharton. He says this whenever someone questions his judgment. “I went to the Wharton School of Business. I’m, like, a really smart person,” is one common formulation.
It’s an axiom: When you have to cite your credentials, you’re afraid that people are discounting them. Wharton is an Ivy; Trump earned his way into the school, at least partly; if he was truly stupid, even his father’s reputation wouldn’t have gotten him in all the way. So getting into Wharton represents something real that Trump accomplished (more or less) by himself. That’s his first line of defense, mind you, when someone questions his ideas.
3. Sudden bursts of brashness. I get that Trump likes attention — we all do — and wants to be the loudest voice in the room — again, that’s not abnormal — and that he understands how to manipulate news cycles. But there’s a deeper reason for his instant recipe policies: He needs the approval of his crowds. It fortifies him against charges that he is empty, dumb, lucky, or a daddy’s boy.
Very fortunately for Trump, a large number of his supporters validate him because they are hypersensitive to sleights against their own status and position in society right now. They’re Christians under attack from secularists; Americans under attack from Muslims; conservatives under attack from their leadership in Congress; white people under attack from minorities; middle-class people under attack from poor people who are slurping up government services at their expense. Like Richard Nixon’s “bundle of resentments” (Rick Perlstein’s phrase), Trump’s bundle of insecurities serve the interests of his potential voters right now.
These are just the macronutrients in Trump’s brew. His penchant for insults — particularly physical insults — is not something that secure people do. Even mean, secure people do not gratuitously insult someone’s appearance because they disagree with them. Mean, insecure people do because they instinctively know how powerful those insults can be, and how they can deflect attention from the flaws of the person who makes them.
Let me list a few other traits of powerful, insecure people:
1. They blurt out things told in confidence.
2. They constantly complain about being treated fairly.
3. They cannot account for anyone else’s successes.
4. They surround themselves with sycophants who pantomime their method of relating to other people.
Donald Trump is just not very comfortable with being Donald Trump. His insecurity is not universal; he does not seem to be terribly obsessed with his hair, or his looks; he doesn’t seem to care about being labeled a bigot or a racist. What he cares about is being seen as smart enough, as someone who worked hard to make it where he has made it.
And hey — he did go to Wharton.
By: Marc Ambinder, The Week, December 11, 2015
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