My god, is it Xmas
already? For pundits and comedians, the Trump campaign has been the gift
that keeps on giving. As someone on Fark put it, “I’m not sure I can
handle this much schadenfreude so early in the day”.
And it’s Bill Clinton’s 70th birthday —
coincidence?
Fark, as usual, scores with the best headline,
"Paul Manafort has resigned from the Trump campaign in order to spend more
time at his summer home in Kiev”.
If half the stories
about his Russian connections are true, he may soon be flat-sharing with
Snowden. Perhaps, as one Farker suggested, they could do a sitcom.
Maybe I missed it, but
I don’t recall the Clinton campaign bringing up Manafort’s dodgy past working
for the corruption-laden pro-Russia party of Ukraine’s former president Victor
Yanukovych. Even Trump's illegal solicitation of foreign campaign
contributions was dismissed
as incompetence. But you can imagine
what a meal the Trump campaign would have made of any whiff of wrongdoing by a
Clinton staffer.
Is Hillary even
campaigning at this point or just sitting back and waiting for Trump to open
his mouth again? I’d say you could set your watch by his gaffes, but
there may be more than one an hour. His outreach to black
voters could not have gone worse if David Duke had been manning the
teleprompter.
Being a Trump advisor
must be the easiest job in the world. Since he listens to no-one and does
exactly as he pleases, you just collect your cheque for doing sweet fuck all.
I’m currently job hunting. If I had no morals or scruples
whatsoever, I’d get in on a piece of that.
We've moved beyond dumpster fire to Port-a-Potty inferno. |
As amusing as this is
on some levels, it is also disheartening and alarming that there are people
stupid and ignorant enough to vote for Trump. No matter how thoroughly his campaign self-conflagrates between now and November, there will still be
voters who will tick his name on the ballot. If this
Daily Show segment was not staged, I give up all hope for the future.
Some columnists, like
Nicholas Kristof here, think that Trump is making Americans meaner.
Of course, he is merely serving as a catalyst to encourage latent attitudes
to bubble to the surface. The meanness, and the sexism, racism, and
xenophobia, were always present in Americans but most major party candidates in
the last 50 years had been careful to keep their calls to those voters at the
proverbial dog whistle level. The Republican party feigned
chagrin when Trump made those appeals openly. And everyone else
delighted in their discomfiture (there’s a surfeit of schadenfreude going around
this election season). This is the party the Rethugs were creating by
serving the policy interests of the rich by getting the poor to vote against
their own interests with coded appeals to the basest social conservative attitudes.
They had a great bait and switch game going: Obscure the fact that your policies are making life harder for the majority of your voters by feeding into the rawest human instincts to blame the Other. Scapegoating to deflect attention from their own policies has been their MO for decades. And a black Muslim community organiser from Kenya as president just made it that much easier, not to mention a female candidate as their opponent. Blame immigrants, blame blacks, blame women, and don’t look too closely at what we’re actually not doing to help you. Then Trump comes along and misses the dog whistle part, embarrassing the GOP. Except…it works: The base the party has cultivated gives Trump the nomination. Some prominent GOPers were gobsmacked. Apparently, they’ve never heard the old expression “you reap what you sow”.
They had a great bait and switch game going: Obscure the fact that your policies are making life harder for the majority of your voters by feeding into the rawest human instincts to blame the Other. Scapegoating to deflect attention from their own policies has been their MO for decades. And a black Muslim community organiser from Kenya as president just made it that much easier, not to mention a female candidate as their opponent. Blame immigrants, blame blacks, blame women, and don’t look too closely at what we’re actually not doing to help you. Then Trump comes along and misses the dog whistle part, embarrassing the GOP. Except…it works: The base the party has cultivated gives Trump the nomination. Some prominent GOPers were gobsmacked. Apparently, they’ve never heard the old expression “you reap what you sow”.
On the academic side,
some political scientists, such as Larry Sabato, view Trump as an anomaly:
"I'm old enough to have closely followed the 1964 and 1972 presidential
campaigns, so I've seen the parties commit suicide before….the grass roots of
the party can occasionally rebel and conquer the establishment, as Goldwater,
McGovern, and most of all, Trump prove."
But other scholars, like rising star Matthew MacWilliams, warn that Trump
is an omen of authoritarians to come: "Trump's authoritarian, ascriptive
message is not an anomaly in American history. Its success in 2016, however, is
and represents a potentially concerning development for Madisonian democracy
(and civil society). Trump's core support is firmly rooted in authoritarianism
that, once awakened and stoked, is a force with which to be reckoned. Democracy
is about compromise. Authoritarianism is about us-versus-them." The rest of that debate is here.
Trump himself even
seemed a little surprised he got that far. He didn’t give a flying fuck
about the GOP platform (although he did tone down the clownish orange hair to a
less risible trust-me-I'm-a-grandfather grey – someone overruled him there) but
it somehow sank in that, as a Republican candidate, he had to parrot some basic
Republican policy positions. Except he doesn’t share these views or grasp
the nuances of how the GOP uses them to appeal to social conservatives, so his
parroting was more like a parody. When he pretended to be opposed to abortion
(he is most assuredly in favour of it, especially for unattractive women and
minorities), he made the logical leap to prosecuting women for having illegal
abortions. Except the GOP doesn't go there - the standard rhetoric is to
punish providers but treat women as victims. Oops, Trump didn’t get that
nuance, and none of his advisors (he hires the “best people” doncha know) filled
him in. Then he paid perfunctory lip service to the current GOP campaign
to defund Planned Parenthood because they provide abortions, but he made the
mistake of saying they do good work for a lot of women, not realising he was
supposed to vilify the entire organisation as a satanic tool of the
anti-Christ. Whoops again. And so it goes. His remarks on
abortion and Planned Parenthood make a superficial kind of sense - if abortion
were illegal, then why wouldn’t women who sought abortions be punished for
violating the law, and if the objection to Planned Parenthood is that it
provides abortions, why not distinguish that from its other healthcare services.
But the abortion issue is used by the GOP in a purely emotional way;
there is no real desire on the part of the party to outlaw abortion or even
reduce its occurrence. It’s purely a vehicle for securing votes, not
making policy; it isn't supposed to make sense.
So, we have the overt
appeals to the basest tendencies of the base, and the bungled parroting of GOP
policy stances. That’s two ways Trump has embarrassed the party for which
he is technically now the party leader. But we’ve saved the best for
last: He pretends to take the side of the working classes, promising to
promulgate (not that he knows that word) policies that would help them.
He doesn’t vow to end Social Security and repeal Obamacare; he says he is
going to protect SS and replace Obamacare with "something great, something
terrific”. Now, to be fair, previous GOP candidates learned to tone down
their rhetoric on gutting entitlements, especially Medicare and Social
Security. They could safely campaign on cutting off those deadbeats on
welfare and foodstamps, but too many GOP voters were at or near 65 and glib
calls to privatise Social Security or cut Medicare benefits proved to be
political suicide. Instead they kept up the rallying cry of tax cuts and
more tax cuts but promised to preserve the entitlements that hardworking
seniors had paid into. How? Well, they were always a bit circumspect
about that part, maybe by cutting veterans’ benefits and education funds, eliminating
the EPA, and that always convenient line to find money by cutting waste and
fraud. But Trump took it a step further by promising to help the working
class economically. The GOP had always persuaded the poor to vote against
their economic interests using appeals to the socially conservative tendencies
created by their ignorant myopia and religiosity. The party never had to
explicitly promise them anything economically; they didn’t have to be that
disingenuous. Just mention abortion or "states' rights" and
they had the votes.
None of Trump’s promises are reality-based, such as ending free trade and bringing back blue collar manufacturing jobs, and of course he has no affinity with nor concern for the working class whatsoever, but combine these simplistic promises with his openly sexist, racist and xenophobic rhetoric, and the base goes wild. He is telling them exactly what they want to hear. Some pundits warn against being so scathingly condescending toward Trump’s supporters, to which I reply, why not? They don't have a collective IQ of room temperature, and contempt is not tantamount to complacency. The GOP, like a lawyer selecting a jury, has always favoured the uneducated and ignorant because they are easier to manipulate. If you own an oil company, you want a populace who is taught creationism in the schools. Much easier to convince such people that climate change is a liberal hoax than people who have had any science education.
None of Trump’s promises are reality-based, such as ending free trade and bringing back blue collar manufacturing jobs, and of course he has no affinity with nor concern for the working class whatsoever, but combine these simplistic promises with his openly sexist, racist and xenophobic rhetoric, and the base goes wild. He is telling them exactly what they want to hear. Some pundits warn against being so scathingly condescending toward Trump’s supporters, to which I reply, why not? They don't have a collective IQ of room temperature, and contempt is not tantamount to complacency. The GOP, like a lawyer selecting a jury, has always favoured the uneducated and ignorant because they are easier to manipulate. If you own an oil company, you want a populace who is taught creationism in the schools. Much easier to convince such people that climate change is a liberal hoax than people who have had any science education.
Trump’s success has
waned after the primaries in part due to his lack of understanding of electoral
politics. A certain percentage of the electorate, let’s call it 45% on
each side, although that is just a simplification for explanatory purposes,
will always vote R or D. A tiny fraction of those one-party voters will
bother to vote in the primaries, likely those who are most rabidly partisan.
In the primaries, candidates are trying to distinguish themselves from
other members of their own party with whom they presumably share broad
agreement on policy. Usually, but not always (see: 2016 Republican
primary) after the vitriolic dust settles, the parties pick the most moderate,
presidential-looking and well-funded candidate. The far-right and
far-left fringe candidates on either side get weeded out as unviable and
unpalatable to the majority (bye, bye Bernie). The nominees then pivot to
the general, where they are both going for the exact same voters: The 10% in
the middle who are undecided. The
entire general election is about these undecided voters. Now, it is
more complicated than that when you factor in motivation — there are both
undecided and firmly partisan voters who may not bother to go to the polls, and
candidates need to inspire them, especially in swing states. But the
point is that in the general election campaign, both candidates need to fall
all over themselves to seem as moderate and inoffensive to every constituency
as possible. They don’t have to worry about alienating their base — the
dedicated D and R voters realise that campaign rhetoric is 50% bullshit and 50%
horse shit, and they trust their party’s candidate to roughly toe the party
line once elected (which does not translate to following the party platform,
which is generally ignored by everyone and probably never even read by most
candidates, let alone voters). So far,
there has been no sign that Trump is moderating his campaign rhetoric for the
general or that he is even aware that this is a thing that candidates do and
why. Granted, if you're still an
undecided voter in this election, you are too
stupid to be allowed to vote.
Candidates also don’t
waste money and time campaigning in all 50 states. They skip states whose
electoral votes have usually gone to the other party and appear likely to do so
again. According to Politico, 33 states have voted
for the same party in the last five presidential elections. The
candidates know to focus on the larger swing states, such as Ohio,
Pennsylvania, and Florida. If the Electoral College were eliminated and
the presidential election decided by the popular vote, it would dramatically
change campaigning, likewise if more states gave out their electoral votes
proportionally. As it stands, candidates
can target their ads and their appearances to only the swing states with the
most electoral votes at stake. Well, apparently
Trump missed that memo, too. He has been
campaigning in blue states, including NY, CT, ME, and OR. His staff says he is planning to go to Ohio
at some point, but it doesn't seem to be a priority.
As Trump’s campaign
continues to self-destruct, it's tempting to get complacent. Don't.
No-one thought he'd win the primary either. And there's another old saying:
If you're sick of
hearing about the election, (and, at this point, I think most of us cheered
when comedian Lewis Black, on one of the final Nightly Show episodes, ordered:
"If you wanna do it this long, then it has to stop Memorial Day weekend
until Labor Day. JUST SHUT UP! It's the fucking summer, okay?") and you
read just one story about the Olympics, make it the
one about Steele Johnson.
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