“A Reality-Show Version Of An Actual Campaign”: Donald Trump; A Farce To Be Reckoned With
Anxiety-ridden GOP masterminds will eventually find a way to solve the Trump Problem. Until they do, however, the Republican Party threatens to become as much of a laughingstock as what David Letterman used to call “that thing on Donald Trump’s head.”
Suddenly, according to recent polls, the iconically coiffed mogul has to be taken . . . how, exactly? Obviously it’s not possible to take Trump seriously, since there’s nothing remotely serious about him or his “campaign,” which is nothing more than a reality-show version of an actual campaign. But if his poll numbers are going to place him in the top tier of Republican candidates, he can’t be ignored.
Let’s call him a farce to be reckoned with.
A CNN poll released Wednesday found that Trump was favored by 12 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents nationally, putting him in second place behind dynastic scion Jeb Bush, who was at 19 percent. Other recent surveys showed Trump trailing only Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in Iowa and only Bush in New Hampshire.
Trump reacted to his rising political status with typical self-effacement and modesty, saying that “politicians are all talk and no action and the American public is ready for a leader with a proven track record of success.”
Trump’s track record would look a lot better without the corporate bankruptcies, and many doubt he’s worth anything near the $9 billion he claims. But let’s stipulate that he is a wealthy man who inherited a real estate empire from his father and displayed a talent for both making and losing huge amounts of money.
Let’s also stipulate that while Trump can’t win the nomination, he can be a significant factor in the race — and not, for the Republican Party, in anything resembling a good way.
Already, he has sent a clear message to Latino voters, whom GOP strategists desperately want to attract. Go away, Trump tells them; put as much distance between yourselves and this party as you possibly can.
In his announcement speech, which was really more of an extended improvised riff, Trump gave a description of Mexican immigrants that was both chauvinistic and xenophobic. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Note the magnanimity: Trump, a big man, is willing to take it on faith that some immigrants from Mexico are not rapists. He clearly believes that very many are, however. When pressed on the subject by CNN’s Don Lemon, Trump insisted, “Well, somebody’s doing the raping, Don. I mean somebody’s doing it. Who’s doing the raping? Who’s doing the raping?”
Who, indeed? Trump will have some free time to get to the bottom of this mystery because his slurs led NBCUniversal, which has aired his reality show “The Apprentice,” to sever all ties with him and Univision to announce it will no longer carry his Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants. The Macy’s department store chain decided to no longer carry Trump’s line of menswear, which was interesting news to me because I didn’t know he had a line of menswear. Hard to imagine that the combed-over-mogul look was ever a big seller.
But I digress. The point was how Trump had insulted men and women of Mexican heritage. It’s hard to stay focused when writing about him because there is no thread to grasp. Trump professes to know everything about everything and refuses to acknowledge a shred of evidence to the contrary. “I’m right because I say so” pretty much sums up his political philosophy.
But everyone knows who he is, which is more than can be said for many of the hopefuls buried in the GOP scrum. And nobody knows how to draw attention to himself better than Trump. If by some unimaginable fluke he did become president, does anyone doubt he’d try to put his name in big gold letters on the north portico of the White House?
Viewers will tune in to the Republican debates just to see whom Trump insults next. “The Chinese” will come in for a lambasting, of course. Perhaps he will tell us again what a great relationship he has with “the blacks.” Or maybe he will expound on his solutions for the turmoil in the Middle East, which all seem to involve taking other countries’ oil.
The one thing Trump can accomplish is to bring the Republican campaign down to his level. A party that allows such a travesty deserves to lose.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 2, 2015
“How The Right Hijacked MLK To Fight Gay Marriage”: Their Cause As Just And Noble As Those Against Slavery, Segregation, And Nazism?
In their fight against the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision, leading conservatives have been turning to an unlikely source for inspiration: Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (PDF), the collection of notes that King smuggled out of his jail cell during his eight-day detention for protesting the Jim Crow laws that sanctioned discrimination across the South.
The letter is one of the most iconic documents from of the Civil Rights era and includes King’s observations on the injustice of segregation and the daily humiliations that black men and women were suffering in their public and private lives.
Fast forward 50-plus years to Sunday morning when pastor-turned-presidential candidate Mike Huckabee referenced King as he decried the same-sex marriage ruling handed down last week as “judicial tyranny.” Huckabee also predicted that Christians across the country would “go the way of Martin Luther King,” and disobey the Supreme Court’s ruling that same-sex marriages must be legal in all 50 states.
“In his brilliant essay, the letters from a Birmingham jail, [King] reminded us, based on what St. Augustine said, that an unjust law is no law at all,” Huckabee during an interview on ABC’s This Week. “And I do think that we’re going to see a lot of pastors who will have to make this tough decision.”
Days earlier, the National Organization for Marriage, which has long opposed marriage equality, cited the same clause in a blistering take down of the Court’s ruling, comparing it to the 1857 Dred Scott decision that declared slavery constitutional.
As the marriage question has wound its way through the courts, conservatives from Franklin Graham to Tom DeLay and Dr. James Dobson (PDF) used the same portion of King’s letter to make the case that the Court’s decision to expand the right to marry would be unjust and immoral.
And when a group of Alabama pastors gave Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore an award this year to recognize his efforts to stop same-sex marriage, they called it the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail Award.”
But King experts say the basic premise of equating King’s fight against segregation with moral objections to same-sex marriage doesn’t ring true to King’s broader message of inclusion, tolerance and the rights of minorities to live by the laws of the majority.
“King never said a law is immoral if it doesn’t line up with the Bible. He would never have said anything like that. That’s not the way he thought,” said Doug Shipman, the founding director of the National Center for Civil Rights and Human Rights. “If you look at the letter, morality is bringing people together, not separating them from each other. So it seems odd that King would draw an exclusive line someplace.”
More broadly, it also seems odd that some cultural and religious conservatives are increasingly appropriating not just the language of the Civil Rights movement, but are also identifying themselves as an oppressed minority in a country that remains mostly white and mostly Christian.
On Sunday, Roy Moore warned Alabama churchgoers that they should prepare for their persecution. “Welcome to the new world,” he said.
At a protest to keep the Confederate flag flying on the statehouse grounds in Alabama over the weekend, a woman carried a sign that read “Southern Lives Matter,” which spawned the Twitter meme #SouthernLivesMatter. It was exactly as ugly a cocktail as you’d expect from a combination of race, Twitter, and a discussion of the merits and shortcomings of the Confederacy.
At the same rally, a Confederate flag supporter told the AP, “Right now, this past week with everything that is going on, I feel very much like the Jews must have felt in the very beginning of the Nazi Germany takeover. I mean I do feel that way, like there is a concerted effort to wipe people like me out, to wipe out my heritage and to erase the truths of history.”
Those truths of history make it impossible to draw a straight line from American slavery to Nazi Germany to the Jim Crowe South to today’s conservatives, who have seen social change sweep across the country in the last week and felt powerless to stop it.
Historically accurate or not, that lack of power, that sense of being a victim to current events, has become a key element of the new populism on the right that candidates like Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, and Scott Walker are trying to harness.
That explains Huckabee’s and other conservatives’ decision to graft the fight against gay marriage onto MLK’s fight for Civil Rights. It also makes Ted Cruz’s reaction to the marriage decision (telling an Iowa crowd that “the last 24 hours at the United States Supreme Court were among the darkest hours of our nation” and hitting the “elites” on the Court), make perfect sense. And it explains why Scott Walker would suggest a constitutional amendment on same-sex marriage that would be ratified by the states through a vote of the people.
By telling conservatives that their fight is as difficult and just and noble as those against slavery, segregation, and Nazism, the GOPers are not only endorsing conservatives’ fight, they are also casting themselves as the next Lincoln, the next FDR, or the next MLK that history will require to overcome tyranny.
When Huckabee quoted from King’s letter on Sunday, it wasn’t the first time. At the March for Marriage in front of the U.S. Capitol in 2014, he read lengthy passages of King’s words from a white iPhone to the crowd that had gathered to protest same-sex marriage.
“I wish I had penned those words,” Huckabee said. “But they were penned by someone who understood freedom, and understood that there was a time to stand up against law when it has become unjust. Those are the words that were penned in 1954 by Martin Luther King Jr. in his letter from the Birmingham Jail.”
Among other omissions and inaccuracies, Huckabee botched the date King wrote the letter. It was in 1963.
By: Patricia Murphy, The Daily Beast, July 1, 2015
“The GOP Gay Marriage Freakout”: The Modern Republican Party Is Operating More And More Like An Underground Crime Network
Marriage equality has won at the Supreme Court, but the fight over gay marriage is far from over. Now we enter the Republican temper tantrum phase.
Even before the Supreme Court’s ruling, several prominent Republicans had pledged to disobey any high court ruling in favor of marriage equality—and had called on their fellow Republican leaders to do the same.
For instance, Republican presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee have both signed a pledge that reads, “We will not honor any decision by the Supreme Court which will force us to violate a clear biblical understanding of marriage as solely the union of one man and one woman.”
Huckabee also challenged the authority of our nation’s highest court when he said, “The Supreme Court can’t overrule God.”
Republican Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Steve King also called for Congress and any future Republican president to flagrantly ignore such a Supreme Court ruling.
Let’s be clear: These are current and former officeholders, who have taken an oath to uphold the laws of our nation, literally pledging to violate those laws as interpreted by the Supreme Court.
In any reasonable political environment, this should be a disqualifier for elected office. Certainly, measures should be considered to charge those of them who hold office with violating their oath.
Republicans in Congress recently filed suit against President Obama for using his lawful executive authority to de-prioritize certain deportations of immigrants. Said Republicans were outraged! Now here we have Republicans treading far beyond the legal gray area, actually pledging to violate their duties and break the law.
I’d love to say such behavior is unimaginable. But unfortunately, it’s becoming predictable within the GOP.
“If the court tries to do this it will be rampant judicial activism,” Cruz said before the ruling. “It will be lawlessness.”
No, actually, saying that as a senator or as president you will disobey the ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States of America—that is the very definition of lawlessness.
Of course this attitude comes from the same party that after 60 failed votes to repeal Obamacare and two now failed legal challenges rising all the way up to the very same Supreme Court, still pledges to keep trying to undo the law. The modern Republican Party is operating less like a responsible partner in governance and more and more like an underground crime network—continually abusing and threatening the otherwise democratic process if it doesn’t get its way.
So far, in the aftermath of the decision, Republican candidates have offered statements affirming their opposition to the ruling and leaning on the new, more modest GOP chestnut that “religious freedom” must be protected.
Governor Huckabee took to Twitter after the ruling, saying that the Supreme Court could no more overrule “God’s nature” than overrule gravity. But alas, just as it has in fights for justice and equality throughout history, the Supreme Court has done its job—interpreting the Constitution of our nation and applying it equally to all Americans.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker issued one of the more curious formulations. “I call on the president and all governors to join me in reassuring millions of Americans that the government will not force them to participate in activities that violate their deeply held religious beliefs,” he said in a press release. “No one wants to live in a country where the government coerces people to act in opposition to their conscience.”
Apparently, Walker is afraid people will be forced to get gay married. Don’t worry, America, that’s Phase 143 of the gay agenda. It’s still early. Right now, we’re preoccupied trying to uphold the basic values and laws of America—which elected officials of both parties should be doing, too. But frankly, when it comes to some Republicans, it’s indeed more likely that gravity will be overruled and pigs will fly.
By: Sally Kohn, The Daily Beast, June 26, 2015
“Products Of Today’s Republican Party”: The Only Way GOP Governors Can Run For President Is By Shafting Their Own States
Given that there are currently 31 Republican governors, it’s natural that more than a few of them would be both successful enough and ambitious enough to run for president. Two more governors are about to formally enter the race: Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal will announce his candidacy today, and New Jersey’s Chris Christie is reportedly ready to join as early as next week. There will end up being as many as four current governors in the race (those two, plus Scott Walker and John Kasich), plus four former governors (Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki).
Let’s put the former governors aside for the moment. There’s something curious going on with the sitting governors: three of them are extremely unpopular at home, and the fourth may be the one who provides the explanation why.
Let’s start with the new entrants. Bobby Jindal has long been regarded as a future presidential candidate, but his current profile makes you wonder why he’s bothering to run for president. It’s not just that he’s currently averaging 0.7 percent in presidential polls, putting him in 15th place. Jindal just got through a budget crisis with a ridiculous tax gimmick that made him an object of national ridicule, and nobody is arguing they need to emulate Louisiana’s record of success. One recent poll put his approval in the state at 31 percent.
Chris Christie isn’t doing any better. His approval is now at 30 percent, and it’s pretty clear his tough-guy schtick wore thin a while ago, even in New Jersey (let alone in places like Iowa).
Then there’s Scott Walker, who’s in the first tier of presidential candidates, but has the approval of only 41 percent of Wisconsinites. As the New York Times describes today, he’s in a battle with Republicans in the state legislature:
Leaders of Mr. Walker’s party, which controls the Legislature, are balking at his demands for the state’s budget. Critics say the governor’s spending blueprint is aimed more at appealing to conservatives in early-voting states like Iowa than doing what is best for Wisconsin.
Lawmakers are stymied over how to pay for road and bridge repairs without raising taxes or fees, which Mr. Walker has ruled out.
The governor’s fellow Republicans rejected his proposal to borrow $1.3 billion for the roadwork, arguing that adding to the state’s debt is irresponsible.
And therein lies part of the problem: appealing to the GOP primary electorate means, among other things, never raising taxes, even when refusing to do so initiates a budget crisis. It also means rejecting the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, which shoots your state in the foot for the purpose of ideological anti-Obama purity.
In many ways, Walker has governed from the outset like someone thinking about a presidential primary. He set out to destroy the state’s public employee unions, and now wants to slash hundreds of millions of dollars from the University of Wisconsin budget, not to mention going after tenure (take that, elitists!), which would make it much harder to recruit quality faculty to the state’s beloved university. Those kinds of moves guarantee that he’ll always be a divisive governor, cheering members of his own party and alienating those in the opposing party.
But that’s how you need to govern if you’re going to be able to mount a presidential campaign that isn’t consumed by explaining your heresies. Which brings us to Ohio governor John Kasich, who not only accepted the Medicaid expansion, he invoked a religious imperative to explain his decision to do so. “I don’t know about you, lady,” he told a GOP donor who criticized him for it, “but when I get to the pearly gates, I’m going to have an answer for what I’ve done for the poor.”
Chris Christie accepted the Medicaid expansion too, but at least he can argue that he did so under pressure from a Democratic legislature. And he has attempted to make up for his sin of allowing 400,000 low-income people to get health insurance by proposing to cut Social Security. But Kasich could find himself explaining over and over that he’s a real conservative despite his accommodation to the ACA.
Kasich might try this argument: If this was so terrible, how come I’m the only governor in this race with approval ratings at home over 50 percent?
The problem is that GOP primary voters will probably reply, Who cares? As far as they’re concerned, “success” isn’t defined by whether your constituents are happy with the job you’ve done. Practical achievements like improving the health of your state or even fostering strong job creation are all well and good, but they have to take a back seat to ideological achievements like crushing a labor union, fighting Obamacare, or resisting tax increases.
Governors who run for president are happy to tell you that being a governor is the best preparation for being president, and they have a point. While senators can get away with just making self-aggrandizing speeches without actually accomplishing anything (see Cruz, Ted), governors have no choice but to make similar kinds of decisions to the ones presidents make. They have to set priorities, formulate budgets, and work with a legislature, not to mention the fact that most governors eventually face some kind of crisis that tests their ability to act in trying circumstances. While senators can say “I sponsored some nice bills,” governors have lengthier records to run on.
But it may be no accident that most of the Republican governors currently running for president aren’t popular at home. They’re products of today’s Republican Party, where unflagging commitment to conservative doctrine is what counts as success.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, June 24, 2015
“An Extremely Progressive Agenda”: How Hillary Clinton’s Kickoff Speech Highlighted Her Advantage Over Republicans
Hillary Clinton gave the first major speech of her presidential campaign on Roosevelt Island in New York City, and while it wasn’t quite as heavy on biography as the campaign had led reporters to believe in the past couple of days, it was probably a good preview of what Clinton’s entire campaign will be like: lots of policy talk, with just enough personal content to paint a portrait of a candidate who both advocates for regular people and is a regular person — or, to paraphrase something President Obama once said about her, is regular enough.
This speech, like much of what Clinton does now, is about creating a synthesis out of two related goals or ideas. She wants to energize liberals in a way that also wins independents. She wants to advocate an economic agenda that will be substantively compelling and also creates a personal affinity with voters. It’s Clinton’s good fortune that she has at least the opportunity to do both at the same time.
Presidential candidates come in two basic types: those who can tell a story of personal struggle and those who can tell their relatives’ story of personal struggle. For one of the first times, today Clinton told how her mother was abandoned by her own parents and started supporting herself as a teenager. The point of these stories is to tell people, “I’m just like you.” I understand your struggles and your challenges, and I’ll advocate on your behalf. The truth is that there’s absolutely no relationship between whether a candidate was rich as a child or is rich now and what kinds of policies she’ll pursue as president. But we can conceive of this relationship between the personal and political as a 2 x 2 array with one bad quadrant, one good quadrant and two that could go either way. Here’s my liberally biased version with an example for each, placing Hillary Clinton where she’s trying to place herself:
So FDR was a wealthy scion who championed the cause of the downtrodden, while Scott Walker came from modest circumstances but advocates the interests of the wealthy and corporations. Mitt Romney was a rich guy whom Americans came to believe cared only about rich people, a deadly combination. Clinton is someone who grew up middle-class and is now rich but who would prefer you think of her as a person just like you. Her policy case makes her personal case more persuasive, whereas someone like Walker has to deal with the tension between his personal story and the beneficiaries of his policies.
Of course, personal affinity isn’t all about economic class, and Clinton is obviously counting on women in particular to feel a bond with her and come out to vote. As she said in her speech, “I may not be the youngest candidate in this race, but I’ll be the youngest woman president in the history of the United States.” But while that may have been her biggest applause line, the speech was laden with policy talk, much of it about the economy.
And while some of the positions she mentioned have been more fully fleshed-out than others, what it added up to was an extremely progressive agenda: paid family leave, affordable college education, more infrastructure investments, renewable energy, universal preschool, expanding broadband access and a lot more — all of it wrapped in populist rhetoric (the part about 25 hedge fund managers making more than all of America’s kindergarten teachers seemed to hit a chord).
And I’d challenge Republicans to look at the policy proposals in the speech and say about any of them, “Oh boy, the general electorate isn’t going to go for that.” Which highlights one important way in which Clinton’s path to the White House is easier than that of her potential GOP opponents. They have multiple areas where the goals of winning over Republican primary voters and setting themselves up to assemble a general election coalition are at odds. They need to sound tough on immigration now, but that will hurt them with Hispanic voters next fall. They need to proclaim that the Affordable Care Act must be totally repealed, when most Americans would prefer to make it work better. They need to oppose things like paid leave, minimum wage increases and imposing restrictions on Wall Street bankers, all of which are extremely popular. And they need to do it all while arguing that they understand regular folks and will be their advocates.
Americans might or might not buy that Hillary Clinton is just like them. But the truth is that she could get elected even if most of them don’t, which is something the Republicans probably can’t say.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, June 13, 2015
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