Tag: Trump

When real Americans protest

Republicans are shocked by what they see as the self-destructive fury of “Black Lives Matter” protestors. These people are driven by pure hatred of white people, they say. The land is descending into unprecedented chaos, they say, from which only Donald Trump can rescue us.

I was just reading Rick Perlstein’s history of the US in the 1970s, The Invisible Bridge, and came across this report about events immediately surrounding the 1974 election:

In West Virginia the Thursday before Election Day someone exploded fifteen sticks of dynamite under the gas meter at the school board building just minutes after the superintendent left… Dozens of white men patrolled Campbell Creek with shotguns, following rumors over citizens’ band radio that carloads of blacks were on their way to burn churches. The next day school buses were shot at, and a car owned by parents who insisted on sending their kids back to school was blown up. A police cruiser escorting a school bus was punctured by a rifle shot.

This was all because of disagreements about the choice of school textbooks. When things became more serious — a stabbing incident in a high school in South Boston — it led to this incident:

A mob of white parents formed a blockade around the school to trap the black students and made ready to storm the building. Shattering glass; police horses charging. “Kill the niggers! Kill the niggers!” “Niggers eat shit! Niggers eat shit!” A chorus of mothers led that cheer. President Ford put the 82nd Airborne on alert.

Like fascists everywhere, the Trumpsters work hard to gin up the disorder that they claim alone to be able to master.

How to do it, according to Donald Trump

Last year I wrote a post about the kind of table-thumping simple-minded blather that you sometimes hear about public policy (what the Germans call Stammtischgerede), that reminds me of the Monty Python sketch about a children’s show “How to do it“, which explains to the audience in one two-minute episode

How to be a gynecologist… how to construct a box-girder bridge, … how to irrigate the Sahara Desert and make vast new areas of land cultivatable, and… how to rid the world of all known diseases.

When expressed by the male working classes the simple HTDI solutions that no one is willing to put into practice typically involves violence, stringing the appropriate people up, or use of nuclear weapons. It’s all vague blather, but needs just enough spurious detail to give it the verbal form of presenting a solution. I wrote in this post about the version of HTDI that tends to belch forth from mostly right-wing veterans of the business-lawyer-finance trenches, who like to think that their experience holding meetings and berating subordinates has been far more meaningful than actually doing anything

is the completely generic “I’d get the both sides into the room and tell them, c’mon guys, let’s roll up our sleeves and just get it done. We’re not leaving here until we’ve come up with a solution.”

I didn’t have a particular example to cite at the time, but of course Donald Trump has followed the script exactly. Speaking yesterday at a “National Security Forum”, Trump was pressed on his claim to have a secret plan for defeating ISIS. Despite having previously stated that he knows “more about ISIS than the generals do”, in a speech on Tuesday he said

We are going to convey my top generals and give them a simple instruction. They will have 30 days to submit to the Oval Office a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS.

It’s no wonder some Republicans think President Obama is intentionally betraying the country. If he couldn’t even be bothered to instruct his top generals to come up with a plan. And the 30-day deadline is pure genius…

Thinking out loud

Trump is now predicting massive voter fraud, usually something you do after you’ve lost. There’s a theory that people tend to accuse others of what they are ashamed of planning or having done themselves. I don’t think he has any shame, or that he’s strategic enough to be planning anything so complicated himself. But his backers? How hard would it really be for a top-notch state hacking operation in, say, Russia, to crack the locally organised election computer systems?

The sound of one invisible hand clapping

There is a Rand-ian trope (or Mises-macherei) that attempts to reverse the Marxian notion that labour is the unit of economic contribution, that working people are the creators of our world, and capitalists mere parasites. The opposing view — pushed by Ayn Rand, and advocated in increasingly stark terms by right-wing politicians, is that the capitalists and managers are “job-creators”, that everything exists because of their contributions. From Adam Smith’s idea that capitalism enables the private greed to be channeled into promoting the public good, we have come to the notion that private greed is itself almost a form of charity.

The reductio ad absurdum has been provided (of course) by Donald Trump, in the less commented upon portion of his bizarre attack on the family of killed-in-action Muslim American soldier Humayun Khan. Responding to Khizr Khan’s attack “You have sacrificed nothing — and no one,” Trump said

I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I’ve had tremendous success. I think I’ve done a lot.

For Trump, a rich man’s “tremendous success” is itself a sacrifice, to be matched against an ordinary man losing his child.

Brecht’s take on this question is below. I cited it in the last US presidential election as well.

Continue reading “The sound of one invisible hand clapping”

Soft bones

From political journalist Simon Maloy in Salon

People often note that public opinion of Hillary tends to be ossified after more than two decades spent continuously in the national political spotlight, but Trump’s unique and unrelenting awfulness as a candidate represents a timely opportunity to get voters to start thinking more positively about Hillary Clinton.

It amazes me that people can make claims like this, in light of the fact that her net favourability in Gallup polls has shifted by almost 50 points in three years. (She was at +31 in April 2015.)

The debate debate

We’re still waiting for the Democratic convention, but ofter that, the general election campaign gets off to a particularly early start, with no defining events until the debates. Debates? Will there actually be US presidential debates in the fall?

I haven’t seen any discussion of this. Of course there will be debates. There are always debates. But then, candidates always release their tax returns. I can’t really imagine Trump being willing to share a stage with a woman, one on one. A woman whom he has been saying should be imprisoned. (Will she need to flee the country if she loses the election?) Surely there will be a fund-raiser for veterans that he can’t possibly miss on the same night as the debate, or his people will just find themselves unable to consent to extremely unfair conditions that the rigged system is trying to impose on him.

An opportunistic political infection

Donald Trump is likely to lose the US presidential election. But maybe not. And we need to recognise that a healthy body politic would not have a dangerous figure like him in striking distance of the most powerful office in the land — and in the world.

Trump is almost comically incompetent, and still has more than 40% of the public willing to vote for him. (According to the most recent estimates of fivethirtyeight.com he has nearly a 40% chance of winning the election.) Even if he doesn’t win, it is purely coincidental that his frightening demagoguy, autocratic impulses, and willingness to trample on democratic traditions and norms was not coupled with even an average competence in running a campaign, or even ability to let professionals take over managing the thing for long enough to get him elected.

A more competent demagogue will almost surely follow where he has led.

Donald Trump and the polygamy of virtue

The expression “marry X to Y” is used conventionally to represent the possibility of combining two unrelated qualities to make a harmonious new quality. Two. But in Donald Trump’s America virtues are polygamous:

[Ivanka Trump] told London’s Sunday Times “And it’s a big reason I am the woman I am today. He always told me and showed me that I could do anything I set my mind to if I married vision and passion with work ethic.”

Does Mike Pence know about this?

The rot goes deep

There’s a certain kind of insane genius to the Donald Trump performance. So we have this interview, where Trump was asked by a right-wing journalist,

There are still some black Americans who believe that the system is biased against them… What do you say to them?

He answered

Well, I’ve been saying, even against me the system is rigged. When I ran for president, I could see what is going on with the system, and the system is rigged… I can really relate it very much to myself.

Has our democracy really sunk so far, that even white billionaires can’t get a fair shake anymore?

 

Whisper sweet non-racist nothings to me…

Continuing the theme of how Republicans see the problem with Trump as being his mode of expression, rather than his noxious world-view and beliefs, this new comment after everything from Ohio governor John Kasich:

Kasich told Scarborough that he was still open to supporting Trump if he moderated his anti-minority rhetoric and pivoted towards the general election.

It’s almost to Trump’s credit that he won’t camouflage himself, however much his copartisans bribe him so.