US Election 2016

Let Trump Be Trump? At This Point, The Floundering Donald Trump Campaign Has Nothing Left To Lose

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

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Donald Trump has proven himself incapable of being a serious presidential candidate for more than a few consecutive days. So at this point, behind in the polls, there is really not much to lose by playing to his dubious strengths and pursuing a relentless core vote strategy

There is a pivotal episode of The West Wing (Season 1, Episode 19) in which the entire administration of fictional President Josiah Bartlet appears to be stuck in neutral, under continual fire from the Republican opposition and simultaneously unwilling to seriously tackle the big challenges yet unable to close out the small ones.

The climax of the episode features a showdown between President Bartlet and his loyal chief of staff, Leo McGarry, who tells Bartlet that he and the entire staff serve at the pleasure of the president and would do anything for him, if only he would shake off his caution and timidity, stop second guessing himself and seek to govern more boldly. The assertive new doctrine that they thrash out: “Let Bartlet Be Bartlet”.

Remembering this scene prompted me to remark, in light of Donald Trump’s spectacularly awful campaign:

https://twitter.com/SamHooper/status/765324579556495360

Many times we feel frustrated with leaders whom we believe in, but who seem to falter at the critical moment or lack the courage of their own convictions. While it was before my time, the tentative early years of Margaret Thatcher’s government spring to mind (the struggles of which are brought vividly to life in Kwasi Kwarteng MP’s excellent book “Thatcher’s Trial”, well worth reading), but there are countless more examples of once promising political candidacies which never got off the ground because the candidate failed to ignite as expected. Rand Paul and Marco Rubio are two such conservative examples from this election cycle alone.

Sadly, when it comes to Republican Party’s current presidential nominee, there is no inspiring higher gear to which the candidate can shift – as Donald Trump seems determined to prove over and over again, this is as good as it gets. And this represents a real problem for the Trump campaign and for the Republican Party, which has tied its fortunes and reputation to this must unstable (and profoundly un-conservative) of individuals.

The anti-establishment schtick and unconventional campaign techniques which propelled Donald Trump to the GOP nomination are not sufficient, it turns out, to sustain a viable presidential campaign. As the National Review’s Jim Geraghty puts it, the conventional campaign rulebook is reasserting itself, and Trump seems frozen, unwilling (but also unable) to adapt.

With just 81 days until election day and new opinion polls showing Hillary Clinton currently having a lock on the electoral college votes she needs to win the White House in November, there isn’t much time for a reset of the Trump campaign. And even if a thorough, genuine reset were to take place it seems unlikely that many of the voters whom Trump has insulted or terrified on his way to the Republican nomination can be persuaded to put their concerns aside and vote for Donald.

Worse still for Trump’s prospects in November, all past attempts to reset the campaign have failed.

So what to do? It is becoming increasingly clear that trying to get Donald Trump to act like a serious, knowledgeable presidential candidate isn’t working – Trump either resentfully ignores the advice he is given, or old habits quickly reassert themselves despite anyone’s best intentions. The “somebody please stop Trump being Trump” mantra is not working. So could the solution be to do exactly the opposite – to Let Trump Be Trump?

New York Magazine’s Frank Rich thinks so:

Those dreary Trump “presidential” speeches — the “policy” addresses he has lately been reading listlessly from teleprompters — have bought him nothing. Trump is indeed beyond coaching, and, with Manafort sidelined, Trump is free to be Trump full-time again. Bannon and Ailes are both pugilists likely to pump his volume back up to the full Mussolini-Giuliani timbre. It may not make a difference come November, but I’d argue it’s the only way for Trump to go.

As we’ve learned over the past year, Trump’s supporters don’t care about the journalistic investigations debunking his career and ethics, or about his complete disregard for facts, or about his chilling, unworkable, and destructive prescriptions to “make America great again.” When he said that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and still hold on to his hard-core base, he had a point. So he might just as well be as outrageous and noisy as he possibly can. Reaching every conceivable aggrieved white American out there, particularly the “poorly educated” whom he admires and particularly those who might not be regular voters, is his best hope, however faint, for achieving a putsch. (Particularly if some October surprise upends his opponent.) The time for Trump to woo, say, undecided suburban voters by attempting (incompetently) to mimic lunchtime speakers at the Council on Foreign Relations is over.

In fact, there are already some signs that this is exactly what the Donald Trump campaign now intends to do. Rather than show any evidence of outreach to wavering undecided American voters, Trump has continued playing to the gallery of his true believers with his unprecedented and intemperate attacks on Hillary Clinton. Rather than appearing with Republican politicians who are respected on a bipartisan basis, Trump continues to cement his public image by appearing with partisan carnival barkers like Rudy Giuliani, now a small, aged and perpetually frightened shadow of his former self.

This was cemented by yesterday’s announcement that the Trump campaign will hire Breitbart executive Stephen Bannon as new campaign chief executive – elevating somebody from the loud and unapologetic conservative media with no experience in political campaigns.

From the Washington Post:

Donald Trump, following weeks of gnawing agitation over his advisers’ attempts to temper his style, moved late Tuesday to overhaul his struggling campaign by rebuffing those efforts and elevating two longtime associates who have encouraged his combative populism.

Stephen Bannon, a former banker who runs the influential conservative outlet Breitbart News and is known for his fiercely anti-establishment politics, has been named the Trump campaign’s chief executive. Kellyanne Conway, a veteran Republican pollster who has been close to Trump for years, will assume the role of campaign manager.

[..] Trump’s stunning decision effectively ended the months-long push by campaign chairman Paul Manafort to moderate Trump’s presentation and pitch for the general election. And it sent a signal, perhaps more clearly than ever, that the real estate magnate intends to finish this race on his own terms, with friends who share his instincts at his side.

Dreher thinks we have entered the world of farce:

Frankly, I think American politics crossed over into The Onion territory some time ago now – this latest news is barely a ripple in the sea of absurdity. But from a strategic perspective, in which a political campaign has to make its best shot with the resources available to it, what else is the Trump campaign to do?

I recently described the Trump campaign’s problem like this:

It’s not that Trump chooses not to surprise everyone and confound expectations by playing the policy wonk and actually taking the time to read up on issues before running his mouth off on live television – it’s that he is physically incapable of being a mature, intellectually curious potential leader, even if he wanted to be. And even when despairing aides hold their make-or-break “interventions” in an attempt to set him on the straight and narrow, Trump simply smiles and nods, and two days later he is back off the Teleprompter again, picking another unwinnable fight or pursuing one of his many personal vendettas.

So more of the same then, from now until November. The Republicans had better hope that there is an entire army of low-information, first time voters willing to put on pants and leave the couch for the first time in 30 years to vote for their man, because otherwise Hillary Clinton will be taking the oath of office on January 20th.

This really is Trump’s only shot at winning. Generally I refrain from making any comparisons between the Donald Trump phenomenon and Britain’s historic vote to leave the European Union – mostly because Brexit and the campaign to reclaim nation state democracy is something pure and noble, while authoritarian Trumpism is the antithesis of those high ideals. But it must be noted that the EU referendum campaign here in Britain revealed a sleeping army of people who had in some cases not voted for multiple decades, but who were spurred to action by the gravity of the decision being put to them in the form of Brexit.

Donald Trump needs to hope and pray that there is a similar sleeping army of typical non-voters – made up of the economically left behind, the alienated white working classes or whatever other label one wishes to ascribe – lying dormant in America, ready to spring to life and to the polling booth at his campaign’s command.

And those of us who abhor Donald Trump and his nasty, un-conservative brand of grievance-based authoritarianism need to hope and pray that there is no such army, or at least that Trump fails to find their collective “on” switch before November 8th.

But from Donald Trump’s perspective, there is nothing to lose. The New York demagogue has no precious poll lead to squander and no reputation to protect; he is congenitally unable to portray even the facsimile of a humble, temperate, intellectually curious and ideologically rooted leader. Trump’s only chance of victory – short of Hillary Clinton’s campaign detonating over one of the many scandals which stalk the Democratic Party nominee, or some big extraneous shock like a major terror attack on American soil – is to double down with the strategy which brought him thus far, and to surround himself (as he is now doing) with campaign staff who are willing to go with the flow rather than work against the grain of his personality.

In short, the Republican Party’s last, best hope of winning the White House is to stop fighting electoral gravity and simply let Trump be Trump.

Meanwhile, the rest of us will have to trust that what worked so well for President Jed Bartlet in The West Wing does not work miracles for Donald Trump.

 

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Donald Trump: It Doesn’t Get Better

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Donald Trump Obama ISIS

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There is no second, deeper layer to Donald Trump. Contrary to what we were promised by Trump’s apologists, what you see is what you get.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that when it comes to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign there is no higher gear after all, and there will be no pivot towards a more serious, substantial candidacy.

As the New York Times reports, this is as good as it gets:

Advisers who once hoped a Pygmalion-like transformation would refashion a crudely effective political showman into a plausible American president now increasingly concede that Mr. Trump may be beyond coaching. He has ignored their pleas and counsel as his poll numbers have dropped, boasting to friends about the size of his crowds and maintaining that he can read surveys better than the professionals.

In private, Mr. Trump’s mood is often sullen and erratic, his associates say. He veers from barking at members of his staff to grumbling about how he was better off following his own instincts during the primaries and suggesting he should not have heeded their calls for change.

He broods about his souring relationship with the news media, calling Mr. Manafort several times a day to talk about specific stories. Occasionally, Mr. Trump blows off steam in bursts of boyish exuberance: At the end of a fund-raiser on Long Island last week, he playfully buzzed the crowd twice with his helicopter.

But in interviews with more than 20 Republicans who are close to Mr. Trump or in communication with his campaign, many of whom insisted on anonymity to avoid clashing with him, they described their nominee as exhausted, frustrated and still bewildered by fine points of the political process and why his incendiary approach seems to be sputtering.

He is routinely preoccupied with perceived slights, for example raging to aides after Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, in his re-election announcement, said he would stand up to the next president regardless of party. In a visit to Capitol Hill in early July, Mr. Trump bickered with two Republican senators who had not endorsed him; he needled Representative Peter T. King of New York for having taken donations from him over the years only to criticize him on television now.

And Mr. Trump has begun to acknowledge to associates and even in public that he might lose. In an interview on CNBC on Thursday, he said he was prepared to face defeat.

“I’ll just keep doing the same thing I’m doing right now,” he said. “And at the end, it’s either going to work, or I’m going to, you know, I’m going to have a very, very nice, long vacation.”

Already the excuses are being made – Trump roars to his supporters that the only way he can possibly lose the election is if Hillary Clinton cheats, thus helping to ensure that the stench of his candidacy will live on in bitterness and distrust even after November when he has flounced back to Mar-a-Lago.

Not that Trump’s advisers are brimming full of their own wisdom:

Charles R. Black Jr., an influential Republican lobbyist supporting Mr. Trump, said the campaign was in a continuing struggle to tame him.

“He has three or four good days and then makes another gaffe,” Mr. Black said. “Hopefully, he can have some more good days.” Of Mr. Trump’s advisers, Mr. Black said, “They think he is making progress in terms of being able to make set speeches and not take the bait on every attack somebody makes on him.”

Mr. Trump’s advisers now hope to steady him by pairing him on the trail with familiar, more seasoned figures — people he views as peers and enjoys spending time with, like former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York and former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas.

Oh good. So lots more pictures of Donald Trump being introduced by an increasingly doddery-looking Grandpa Simpson Rudolph Giuliani, with his frightened shouting about someone taking away his America, played to a soundtrack of Mike Huckabee’s Christian social conservatism. That’ll really persuade wavering Democrats and America’s undecided middle.

But it’s okay – Donald Trump’s family have a hand on the campaign tiller:

Mr. Trump’s reliance on his family has only grown more pronounced. Mr. Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, who has no background in politics, has expanded his role: He now has broad oversight over areas including the campaign’s budget, messaging and strategy, with the power to approve spending. Mr. Trump has also continued to seek advice from Corey Lewandowski, the campaign manager whom Mr. Trump ousted in June at his children’s urging.

At this rate it is only a matter of time before Trump announces that Ivanka is his pick for Secretary of Defence. Why not, at this point?

And so the man who recently bragged that he could be “so presidential” that it would make us all bored is proving beyond all doubt that he can do no such thing. Donald Trump does not have a more serious side. The oafish blowhard who takes pride in being simultaneously ignorant and needlessly offensive wasn’t putting on a clever act specifically designed to capture the GOP nomination – that’s just who he is.

It’s not that Trump chooses not to surprise everyone and confound expectations by playing the policy wonk and actually taking the time to read up on issues before running his mouth off on live television – it’s that he is physically incapable of being a mature, intellectually curious potential leader, even if he wanted to be. And even when despairing aides hold their make-or-break “interventions” in an attempt to set him on the straight and narrow, Trump simply smiles and nods, and two days later he is off the Teleprompter again, picking another unwinnable fight or pursuing one of his many personal vendettas.

So more of the same then, from now until November. The Republicans had better hope that there is an entire army of low-information, first time voters willing to put on pants and leave the couch for the first time in 30 years to vote for their man, because otherwise Hillary Clinton will be taking the oath of office on January 20th.

 

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How Should A Patriot Act In The Age Of Donald Trump?

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Louisiana Flooding - Baton Rouge

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Make politics petty and unpleasant enough, and soon all that will be left are the pettiest and most unpleasant of people

Rod Dreher offers this meditation on patriotism, viewed through the dual lens of the US presidential election and the catastrophic flooding currently affecting his home state of Louisiana:

Checking just now, I see that Trump has put out seven tweets in a row this morning, whining about how mean the news media is to him. Not a single word about Katrina.2 here in Louisiana. To be fair, Hillary Clinton hasn’t said anything about it either, but her Twitter feed is managed by campaign drones. Trump does his twitter feed himself. I kid you not, as I sat at the stop light at the corner of Airline and Old Hammond Highway, waiting to turn, I looked over at the spot where those three law enforcement officers where shot dead last month, and I thought about all the poor, desperate people I had just seen at the shelter, and all the good men and women of Louisiana spending their Sunday morning doing whatever they can to help their neighbor, and I thought Donald Trump can go to hell.

Honestly, with so much suffering in this country now — acutely here, right now, in Louisiana, but people are hurting all over (seen the news from Milwaukee today?) — all that fathead can do is gripe about how mean the news media are to him. It’s disgusting. I have not been a #NeverTrump conservative, and don’t really care to be part of that crowd now, even though I cannot imagine voting for Hillary Clinton either. I believe Trump has brought up some important issues that the GOP didn’t care to address. But as of today, I wouldn’t vote for Trump if you put a gun to my head. The vanity and the pettiness of that jackass beggars belief. If he had any sense, he would be on a plane down here trying to help, or at least showing real concern, instead of sitting there with his smartphone, bleating like a baby.

You don’t need to know what I think of Hillary. If you are a conservative, it’s exactly what you think too. But it makes me really angry that this is what the conservative party has to offer America in the fall of 2016: this ridiculous clown. And we have him in part because none of the GOP regulars could make the sale to primary voters.

Till now, I’ve been laughing sardonically at the two repulsive figures American voters have to choose from this November, wondering how it ever could have come to this. This morning, I’m mad about it and disgusted beyond belief.

It’s true. Donald Trump has indeed devoted a number of tweets today to moaning about supposedly biased press coverage of his campaign (while utterly ignoring the fact that he would still be making reality TV were it not for the American news media’s fawning coverage of his every move).

Here he is, moaning about how “unfair” the media are being to him, now that they are actually taking time to fact-check his statements and examine his voluminous past public statements and business dealings:

Donald Trump twitter - media coverage

As Dreher acknowledges, Hillary Clinton has not taken the time to comment on the flooding on her Twitter feed either. One thinks back to Hurricane Sandy, falling in the middle of the 2012 presidential election, and marvels at the contrast – though of course we all know that events matter more when they happen to the coasts. But even from an entirely cynical and tactical political perspective, a half competent Republican Party presidential candidate would have taken care to show the people of the affected state (and the nation) that he sees their suffering, and cares about it.

But then the Republican Party does not have a half competent presidential candidate – they have Donald Trump, a man vastly more interested in nursing his petty grievances and rivalries on Twitter than “appearing presidential”, let alone actually being presidential and caring a damn about the suffering of his compatriots.

Dreher is correct too that the GOP is in this ludicrous position “in part because none of the GOP regulars could make the sale to primary voters”. But it is more than that. There is a reason why none of the mainstream Republican candidates were able to find any traction with primary voters – namely the disconnect between their stale old dogmas (ranting about lower taxes, ObamaCare and calling President Obama an un-American threat to national security) and the very real economic pain and political alienation felt by many of their core voters.

Barack Obama may occupy the White House, but Republicans have controlled Congress entirely since 2014. This is a Tea Party Congress, yet Republicans have pointedly failed to deliver the libertarian paradise they promised, mostly because they are every bit as addicted to Big Government as the Democrats. And when you make yourself indistinguishable from the opposition in terms of political outcomes while stoking public hysteria about a Kenyan socialist terrorist trying to destroy America from within, it is little wonder that people scorned the continuity of Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio in favour of Donald Trump’s alternative Republican offering.

Dreher is right too to acknowledge that “Trump has brought up some important issues that the GOP didn’t care to address”. The obvious example is immigration. The duplicity of the Democrats and the American Left in general is staggering: deliberately re-engineering the language to draw no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants, referring to illegal immigrants as being merely “undocumented” – anything the Left can do to excuse and even ennoble lawbreaking is being done.

Some American cities sanctimoniously call themselves “sanctuary cities” – places where honest American citizens who happen to work for the federal government enforcing immigration law are unwelcome while lawbreakers are welcomed with open arms. And too much of the mainstream media is happy to follow along in this subversion of law and language, particularly in the conflation of legal and illegal immigration.

The Republicans are little better, talking a tough talk while being perfectly content to fight the issue to an acrimonious stalemate preserving the status quo. After all, their paymasters are the last people who want to see an end to plentiful cheap labour. Republicans also shame themselves by pretending to their supporters that the millions of illegal immigrants currently living and working in America can be quickly and easily deported with no adverse impact on the local and national economy.

The right thing to do would be for one party to propose a form of one-time amnesty (perhaps allowing those currently living in America illegally to be granted a pathway to official permanent residency while withholding citizenship in recognition of their lawbreaking) while also pledging to get tough on all future lawbreaking, including enhancements to border security and a “one strike and you’re out” rule on visa overstayers and other violators. This would meld the compassion of the Democrat approach with the commitment to law of the Republicans. It would also force more of America’s immigration back through legal routes, forcing the country to have a political debate about how many legal immigrants they wish to allow in every year, and of what skill type.

But neither party will adopt this position. Both choose to childishly demand everything that they want handed to them on a stick, while the reasonable and pragmatic option sails past unheeded. Meanwhile, both Democrats and Republicans get to strut and preen in front of their respective voter bases, acting as though they are the sole custodians of compassion / defenders of the rule of law while making a complete mockery of American hospitality, compassion and the rule of law.

This is why Donald Trump is now a major party presidential candidate – because on issue after issue (immigration is but one example) both parties have chosen to play to their respective supporters, shoring up the base by playing on their fears, rather than daring to lead, educate and step outside of their comfort zone. The Republicans could have prevented the Trump takeover by being the bigger person and making a bold proposition on immigration or trade or any of the other issues where they have been holed beneath the waterline by Trump. But they didn’t. Like a petulant six year old, they wanted to have their cake and eat it – to go on chanting angry mantras about immigration while doing nothing to fix it, and then winning votes based on public anger. And then Trump came along and offered an alternative (if equally bogus solution), and the mainstream Republicans were left with nothing.

And so the Republicans deserve Donald Trump, just like the Democrats deserve Hillary Clinton. But it does not automatically follow that the American people deserve either of them. They deserve a better choice, as this blog has consistently argued. And I think this is what prompts Rod Dreher’s instinct to withdraw from engagement with America’s toxified national politics:

What is my country? Today, to me, it feels like Louisiana. Washington is very far away. Baton Rouge is right here. Nothing against America, you understand, but this hot, wet, miserable piece of ground is where my heart is. I feel that this morning in a way I never quite have. Maybe if I had been here during [Hurricane] Katrina and seen it with my own eyes, I would have come to this realization earlier. But I didn’t. Nevertheless, I’m glad that I did.

The only politics that really matter to me is the politics of this community — that is, the politics of being a good neighbor. Look, I know that politics as statecraft matter. I’m talking about what matters to me. I’d rather be there with the people from the churches and the community, we who are in dry houses today, helping those who have nothing. If that’s the Benedict Option, then I choose it. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have nothing to say to me that I care to hear. For me, this is here and this is now. Hillary, Trump and the rest of them are people from TV Land.

This is an important point: what happens when the Donald Trump freak show finally succeeds in driving the remaining good, temperate people out of politics?

The Washington Post published a long piece this weekend exploring the views of millennial voters toward the presidential election. The short version: naked contempt for both parties and candidates, unlike the strong preference for Barack Obama in 2008/2012. They could soon be a generation lost to political apathy for the next few electoral cycles.

Rod Dreher speaks of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as though they are alien, disconnected people from “TV Land”, with their own feuds and motivations which are utterly alien to the majority of the country. He’s not wrong. And I think the temptation will be strong, as this tawdry election campaign drags on, for normal people with political inclinations to focus their efforts either on single issues or at the local level rather than on national politics, which has rarely been more hyper-partisan and dysfunctional.

Make politics petty and unpleasant enough, and soon all that will be left are the pettiest and most unpleasant of people. If honourable people feel that they cannot make a positive contribution at the national level without getting sucked into the swirling vortex of email scandals, conspiracy theories and vacuous Twitter feuds then America will soon be led by the people who thrive in that atmosphere.

What an utterly depressing, eminently avoidable state of affairs.

 

Donald Trump Hillary Clinton Presidential Election 2016

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Donald Trump, The Republican Fringe And Their ‘Second Amendment Remedies’

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

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Donald Trump is not the first politician to invoke the Second Amendment as a potential tool for remedying grievances

From all of the media outrage, one would think that Donald Trump is the first major political candidate to ever hint at encouraging an armed uprising – that we are somehow in entirely unprecedented territory for a major party candidate to talk this way.

This is what Donald Trump actually said earlier this week:

“Hillary wants to abolish – essentially abolish – the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick – if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”

Trump’s apologists, including the increasingly unbearable Rudy Giuliani, leapt to their man’s defence, insisting that Trump was referring to the unified power of pro-2A lobbying efforts and the combined political might of gun owners. This is – how best to put it – a bold faced lie. If Trump was speaking about political activism he wouldn’t have said “maybe there is”. He would have issued a much stronger, more ringing call to arms, and probably specifically name checked the National Rifle Association while doing so.

Everybody knows that the NRA and allied Second Amendment supporters can muster a strong political campaign in support of gun rights – Trump’s “maybe” clearly refers to something else, something left unsaid but which no serious person can reasonably doubt (whether the suggested target is Hillary Clinton or her judicial picks).

It is sad to see Tim Stanley, whose American political commentary is usually so on the money, accepting this weakest of excuses:

Second, some people seem to want to condemn Trump for things he did not say. This is unnecessary: there’s plenty of legitimate reasons to dislike him without having to make more up. Trump did not say, for instance, that gun rights people should shoot Hillary Clinton to save the Constitution – he actually said that second amendment fans should lobby her to stop her unbalancing the Supreme Court.

Nope. No no no. That isn’t what Trump said at all (ironic, considering the thrust of Stanley’s point was criticising people who put words into the mouths of political candidates). If Trump wanted to make the point that Tim Stanley makes, he could have uttered words to that very effect. But he didn’t. We can be charitable and assume that Trump was joking when he made his comments, but what we cannot do is pretend that he meant something innocuous when the ominous suggestion was clearly left hanging open.

Besides which, Donald Trump knew exactly how his remarks would be interpreted and picked up by the media. He doesn’t find himself topping the news headlines every day by some quirk of chance – he deliberately says things and does things, knowing that they will be interpreted a certain way while still leaving himself just enough wriggle room to claim plausible deniability.

In this parallel universe, Trump didn’t mean to suggest that Fox News presenter Megyn Kelly was menstruating when he talked about “blood coming out of her…wherever”, he was going to say “nose” but couldn’t be bothered to finish his own sentence. He wasn’t really imitating a disabled reporter, he was just indulging in general mockery. This remark is just the latest in a litany of similar under-the-radar provocations.

But does this latest statement from Trump amount to “fighting words”, or a clear call to violence? No – and those authoritarian critics shrieking for Trump to be interrogated by the FBI (as though he is seriously hatching assassination plots) or thrown in prison need to go away and take a good long look at themselves. One can (and should) defend Trump’s technical right to skirt the line between passionate rhetoric and dog whistle politics while still abhorring his behaviour; not everything we despise should automatically be illegal.

(Reading online comments, one is also struck by the number of people who openly yearned for somebody to assassinate Donald Trump who are now clutching their pearls at Trump’s own casual allusion to violence).

Besides, the Republicans have form when it comes to this type of behaviour. This is why the current GOP elites who reach for the smelling salts every time Donald Trump says something inflammatory have no right to be shocked, because they are guilty of presiding over the dramatic increase in GOP craziness over the past eight years, mistakenly thinking that whipping people into an unthinking frenzy would offer them a short cut back to power.

Case in point, here is former Republican senatorial candidate Sharron Angle, fighting a tough senate race against Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid, playing to the Tea Party crowd back in 2010:

 

This is what Sharron Angle says about the Democratic-controlled Senate and her opponent Harry Reid:

“You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. In fact you know, Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every twenty years. I hope that’s not where we are going, but, you know, if this, this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness, what can we do to turn this country around? And I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out. 

What Trump is saying is nothing new, and nothing surprising about the morally debased Republican Party.

The only difference is that six years ago, they were funding and supporting a senatorial candidate in Nevada whom the majority of people nationwide and worldwide were paying no attention to. Now their ultra high-profile presidential nominee is saying the same things and they suddenly find it uncomfortable. Why? Because the GOP is willing to indulge in scummy behaviour when they think that nobody will notice, but get visibly upset when they are caught doing the same thing in the media glare of a presidential election.

So has this episode taught us anything new about Donald Trump, about the Republican Party or about this presidential election? No, it has not. We already knew that Donald Trump is a man who believes that any publicity, including (or especially) the screeching condemnation of the establishment media, is good publicity. We already knew that the Republican Party routinely trawls for votes by pretending that the Second Amendment itself is teetering on some kind of precipice when it clearly is not. And we already knew that this depressing presidential election comes down to a question of temperament.

And that question is as follows: Do the American people want as their leader and as the commander-in-chief of their mighty armed forces somebody willing to jokingly hint that “Second Amendment people” should take unspecified action against his political opponent (who, let’s face it, is so centrist and focus group led that she would never dream of touching the Second Amendment as long as there are votes to be lost by doing so) in order to protect their gun rights from a largely nonexistent threat?

In these highly charged times, when somebody not so smart and not in on the joke could easily miss the nuance and take the political rhetoric very literally, is suggesting that “maybe there is” something that Second Amendment people can do to protect their rights from a nonexistent threat a responsible way for a presidential candidate to behave?

Nobody is suggesting that the Donald Trump or the Republican Party actually want a lone wolf Second Amendment fanatic to take the defence of the Constitution into their own hands and start taking pot shots at Hillary Clinton or her potential judicial nominees. But the Republican Party does have a tawdry recent history of trawling for votes among people  who would heartily approve of such a course of action – always with just wiggle room in the comments to allow plausible deniability when called out.

At this point, nobody expects any better from Trump himself. But some of those politicians and commentators now leaping to his defence have reputations which presumably they would like to maintain beyond this presidential election cycle.

They should think on that the next time Donald Trump says or does something appalling.

 

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America’s Armchair Psychiatrists: Go To Town On Donald Trump, But Lay Off His Supporters

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Donald Trump supporters - idiots

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Donald Trump opponents should spend less time psychoanalysing Trump supporters and more time reflecting on the reasons for their own deep unpopularity

Sometimes, one wonders whether the American left actually want to defeat Donald Trump at all, or if they are more interested in parading their superior moral virtue for others to see. Certainly, the way that they are behaving in the media at present suggests that defeating Trump has become less important than using him as a mirror to reflect their own supposed holiness.

What else could excuse the rash of execrable articles openly mocking Trump supporters and suggesting that they are morally and intellectually defective?

First, a sanctimonious piece in the Washington Post explaining to it’s oh-so-enlightened readers why “facts don’t matter to Trump’s Supporters“:

How did Donald Trump win the Republican nomination, despite clear evidence that he had misrepresented or falsified key issues throughout the campaign? Social scientists have some intriguing explanations for why people persist in misjudgments despite strong contrary evidence.

Trump is a vivid and, to his critics, a frightening present-day illustration of this perception problem. But it has been studied carefully by researchers for more than 30 years. Basically, the studies show that attempts to refute false information often backfire and lead people to hold on to their misperceptions even more strongly.

This literature about misperception was lucidly summarized by Christopher Graves, the global chairman of Ogilvy Public Relations, in a February 2015 article in the Harvard Business Review, months before Trump surfaced as a candidate. Graves is now writing a book about his research at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy.

Graves’s article examined the puzzle of why nearly one-third of U.S. parents believe that childhood vaccines cause autism, despite overwhelming medical evidence that there’s no such link. In such cases, he noted, “arguing the facts doesn’t help — in fact, it makes the situation worse.” The reason is that people tend to accept arguments that confirm their views and discount facts that challenge what they believe.

This “confirmation bias” was outlined in a 1979 article by psychologist Charles Lord, cited by Graves. Lord found that his test subjects, when asked questions about capital punishment, responded with answers shaped by their prior beliefs. “Instead of changing their minds, most will dig in their heels and cling even more firmly to their originally held views,” Graves explained in summarizing the study.

Entirely missing from this “analysis” is any acknowledgement that the phenomenon works both ways, and that Trump supporters are not the only ones prone to confirmation bias, that entirely human instinct to search out more corroborating evidence when attacked rather than accepting the potential validity of the criticism.

The same charge could just as easily be levelled at Hillary Clinton supporters who aggressively dismiss questions around the ethics and competence of the Democratic Party nominee. And while this blog believes that many of these concerns have more to do with a good old fashioned witch hunt than principled criticism (note how Hillary Clinton was previously dismissed by many as a far-left ideologue and is now criticised by the same people, correctly, as a triangulating centrist) the reaction of hardcore Hillary Clinton defenders to criticism of their candidate is no different than the way that Donald Trump’s supporters defend their man.

Unfortunately, this Washington Post article (especially its headline, which in fairness to author David Ignatius was probably not of his creation) makes it seem as though it is only Donald Trump supporters who are susceptible to the trait of confirmation bias, when this is absolutely not the case. It is, in effect, another part of the grubby effort to dismiss the concerns of Trump-supporting Americans, suggesting that their views and political preferences are the result of defective thinking rather than legitimate grievances and concerns.

Even worse than the Washington Post piece, though, is this article from Raw Story, in which neuroscientist Bobby Azarian attempts to remotely diagnose supposed abnormalities found in the brains of Donald Trump supporters.

The piece (the cover picture of which shows a Trump supporter’s face frozen mid-gesture, all the more to make her look stupid) alleges:

The only thing that might be more perplexing than the psychology of Donald Trump is the psychology of his supporters. In their eyes, The Donald can do no wrong. Even Trump himself seems to be astonished by this phenomenon. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”

[..] So how exactly are Trump loyalists psychologically or neurologically different from everyone else? What is going on in their brains that makes them so blindly devoted?

Again, here we see the same arrogance which wrongly presumes that other partisans would behave differently when confronted with evidence that “their” candidate is in some way unacceptable. Yet anybody with eyes and a functioning brain knows that “Hillary Bots” and “Bernie Bros” were likewise called out for blindly supporting their chosen candidate regardless of new information presented.

The article then goes on to list various potential theories which may explain the supposedly uniquely abnormal thinking of Trump supporters:

Some believe that many of those who support Donald Trump do so because of ignorance — basically they are under-informed or misinformed about the issues at hand. When Trump tells them that crime is skyrocketing in the United States, or that the economy is the worst it’s ever been, they simply take his word for it.

[..] The Dunning-Kruger effect explains that the problem isn’t just that they are misinformed; it’s that they are completely unaware that they are misinformed. This creates a double burden.

Studies have shown that people who lack expertise in some area of knowledge often have a cognitive bias that prevents them from realizing that they lack expertise. As psychologist David Dunning puts it in an op-ed for Politico, “The knowledge and intelligence that are required to be good at a task are often the same qualities needed to recognize that one is not good at that task — and if one lacks such knowledge and intelligence, one remains ignorant that one is not good at the task. This includes political judgment.” Essentially, they’re not smart enough to realize they’re dumb.

And if one is under the illusion that they have sufficient or even superior knowledge, then they have no reason to defer to anyone else’s judgment. This helps explain why even nonpartisan experts — like military generals and Independent former Mayor of New York/billionaire CEO Michael Bloomberg — as well as some respected Republican politicians, don’t seem to be able to say anything that can change the minds of loyal Trump followers.

There is a kernel of truth here, inasmuch as that the Dunning-Kruger effect is certainly real, and does in some way explain the behaviour of Trump supporters (others have used it to similarly belittle Fox News viewers). But Azarian seems to be suggesting that Donald Trump supporters are particularly liable to this erroneous thinking, while providing absolutely no evidence to back this up.

Azarian would have us believe that Hillary Clinton supporters are wise oracles, high-minded arbiters of truth and wisdom, who dispassionately compare various politicians against their entirely rational criteria before coming to support their candidate. One can be quickly and easily disabused of this notion by actually speaking to a particularly committed Clinton supporter.

We also see creeping into Azarian’s analysis the same bias in favour of a “tyranny of the experts” which we saw in Britain’s EU referendum, where a whole parade of economists and members of the economic and political elite lined up to bully Britons into voting to remain in the European Union. When Britain rejected the threats of the Remain campaign and voted for Brexit, many commentators have had a complete meltdown, unable to understand how their compatriots could be so “stupid” as to reject the advice of so many self-described experts.

But what they failed to realise is that Brexiteers were not judging the question of Britain’s membership of the EU in the same terms as the experts. The experts, nearly all sinecured members of the establishment, had a post-patriotic mindset in which democracy and self-determination were irrelevant while economic stability and minimising disruption for current economic winners was all that mattered. Brexiteers, by contrast, actually cared about democracy and freedom, and having control over the decisions which affect their lives (as backed up by opinion polling in the immediate aftermath of the referendum). Seeing yet another EU-funded university professor wail that Brexiteers were “racist” and that leaving the EU might cause short term economic uncertainty left us entirely unmoved – to Brexiteers, such uncertainty is a price well worth paying to be free of an organisation as offensively antidemocratic as the European Union.

We see this same arrogance at work in Azarian’s lament that Trump supporters continually disregard the advice of military experts and their economic betters. One does not need to be a Trump supporter – this blog certainly is not – to understand that in the eyes of many Americans, the experts feted by the anti-Trump crowd are the very same people who presided over two very questionable wars and the greatest recession since the Great Depression. In other words, their advice simply doesn’t count for much in the eyes of Trump supporters – and often, the “experts” have only themselves to blame.

Azarian concludes:

So what can we do to potentially change the minds of Trump loyalists before voting day in November? As a cognitive neuroscientist, it grieves me to say that there may be nothing we can do. The overwhelming majority of these people may be beyond reach, at least in the short term. The best we can do is to motivate everyone else to get out to the booths and check the box that doesn’t belong to a narcissistic nationalist who has the potential to damage the nation beyond repair.

Well, congratulations – this article has contributed to a toxic atmosphere of derision against Trump supporters which will have only hardened his support (as even Azarian recognises at one point during the piece). By penning yet another unbearably sanctimonious piece absolving the political establishment of any responsibility for the rise of Donald Trump and suggesting that his supporters are uniquely prone to confirmation bias and other cognitive flaws, the anti-Trump forces are given more license to think of themselves as uniquely rational and virtuous, and to look down on the significant minority of their fellow Americans who prefer Trump to the rotten establishment.

If Donald Trump is to be halted (or the poison taken out of a narrow Trump defeat), the only words this blog wants to see running through the minds of moderate Republicans and Democrats are “how have I enabled the rise of Donald Trump?” and “what can I do differently to stop enraging so many ordinary decent voters, and pushing them into the arms of a demagogue with such questionable policies, morals and temperament?”.

The easy option for the #NeverTrump crowd is to sit back, bask in their own moral virtue and clutch their pearls while looking at horror at the ill-educated, uncouth white trash who give Trump the time of day. That way risks the world waking up to President-Elect Trump on 9 November.

The harder, more virtuous task is to engage in some real introspection, and think hard and uncompromisingly about how years of Democratic and Republican government and opposition have generated such disillusionment and outright hatred of the political class that ordinary, decent people are willing to vest their hopes in Donald Trump.

If the political class are to succeed in preventing a Donald Trump victory, they must demonstrate a willingness to change. Cheerleading for the status quo while angrily demonising those people who refuse to accept it is simply not good enough. Not this time.

Now is the time for the American political class to show that they are capable of humility and change, not simply to engage in anti-Trump moral grandstanding. Donald Trump did not become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in a vacuum. The flame of Trumpism only burns bright because it is sustained by the hot air of establishment Democrats and Republicans who fight their furious pitched battles in Washington D.C. while too many Americans have seen zero change in their own personal circumstances.

So by all means, America’s smug armchair psychiatrists among the #NeverTrump political establishment should go on diagnosing Donald Trump all they want. This blog certainly believes that anyone who gets into Twitter spats with Gold Star parents and D-list celebrities while running for president is dangerously emotionally unstable at best.

But there is nothing to be gained from going to war with Donald Trump’s supporters, many of whom have been repeatedly let down by the moderate, establishment politicians we tend to respect, and whose anger deserves to be acknowledged.

 

Donald Trump - Occupy Democrats

Trump Supporters - Mad as hell

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