Reporter's Notebook

In light of Mitt Romney's announcement that he will vote for neither Trump nor Clinton, I'm wondering if you need to make an addition to your "Resistance" or "Vichy" Republican categories. This is a man who aspired to the presidency, but now when the phone rings at 3 a.m., demanding a decision to deal with a crisis, he rolls over and goes back to sleep.

May I suggest "Pilate Republicans?" (Of course with the same type of disclaimer regarding Jesus as your disclaimer about Hitler.) By washing his hands and withholding his vote for Candidate A, Mitt is casting half  a vote for Candidate B.

Sure, I will give him partial credit but it's hard not to imagine that he clearly (if privately) would prefer a Trump loss to a Clinton loss. And yes, he, as an individual voter, does have the luxury of opting out since Hillary pretty much has a lock on Massachuesetts. But if he didn't want to be influential, he wouldn't be holding a press conference. And many of those he wants to influence are voters in swing states.

Actually, "Pilate" Republicans would really be a subset of "Resistance" Republicans. But a real resistance hero would take the political risk, and may even ameliorate it by announcing he was maximizing his vote to insure a Trump loss, without even mentioning Her.

I’m glad to have an archive of all of this. I look forward to a future where people would not believe this could have occurred except for such efforts.

For early items in the “Trump Nation” thread, you can go here. For recent ones, go here.

While I’m in the neighborhood:

I was struck by Trump’s statement today that his former opponents in the primaries should either endorse him or be “banned” from running for office. This reinforces something I’ve been thinking about regarding Trump.

Many of his supporters (and Trump himself) admire him for being willing to say what he’s thinking even if “politically incorrect.” I find nothing admirable in this trait, which I suspect is more about lack of impulse control than a principled decision to be blunt. As we become mature adults, we come to understand that there are times when you shouldn’t say what you’re thinking. Speaking out will be contrary to your own interest, or it will hurt others, or both. Remaining silent is often just good judgment.

In this case, Trump’s statement doesn’t do anything to help his campaign. Even if he were to successfully bully or shame Rubio, Cruz, Kasich or Bush into endorsing him, it’s not going to add votes to his column. In fact, his whining about not getting their endorsement makes him look weak or desperate. And, in possibly further alienating sitting Republican Senators and other Republican officials, he’s unnecessarily further damaging a relationship that, were he to be elected President, he will surely need at some point.

So, rather than exhibiting an admirable quality of bluntness, Trump once again shows that he is merely immature and lacking in judgment.

For previous items in the “Trump Nation” thread, you can go here.

2. From another reader, a shorter note about the role of “thinking” in politics:

As you recently noted, Trump is apparently always “thinking” very carefully about what will turn his audience on.

Bush and Rove were just the latest in a long list of politicians and operatives who have understood that there are times when a righteous war against a certifiable Bad Guy will make many people feel good or at least better in a way that nothing else will. So far Trump has had no trouble finding plenty of takers for his own, much more theatrical bellicosity - Mission (almost) Accomplished on steroids, as it were.

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3. On levels of complexity in political discourse and motivation:

As a PhD candidate in cognitive psychology, I might add a little to the last writer who mentioned the distinction between "stupid" and "evil."  While most angles on the Trump constituency are focused around some amalgamation of low information voters and those who don't "think," recent cognitive neuroscience research tells the opposite story.

It's not that people who buy into seemingly absurd premises don't think enough, it's that they simultaneously have elaborately thought out and yet tortuously simplistic justifications for Trump's policy positions.  This is how one can take something as complex as fiscal policy or the global economy and reduce it down to base elements of race and gender delineating winners and losers.  

It takes a lot of "thinking" to contort something as odious as sexism or racism into a valid justification for limiting immigration or economic opportunity.  It's this same carefully crafted in-group/out-group distinction that allows people to similarly dismiss Trump calling women pigs and dogs as "rejecting political correctness" , assuredly something no one would accept if it were uttered about one's mother, sister, or daughter.


As a prime example, I note the case of John McGraw, the 78 year old North Carolina man who punched a Trump rally protester as he exited the building escorted by security.  When asked about the incident, McGraw mentioned a possible link to Al-Qaeda and that the next time "we might have to kill him."  

This is the mindset of an intricately constructed worldview in which political protesters could be sleeper cell terrorists.  It takes a large amount of mental effort to jump through the logical hoops necessary to assume that society can easily be made great again and yet be so precipitously close to falling over the cliff of peril.


This is a feature, not a bug, in the Trump campaign.

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4. Finally, on the interlacing roles of expression, and reflection, in making up what we think of as intelligence:

In your recent conversations regarding Trump’s intelligence, I think most of it has to do with how he expresses himself. For example, his limited vocabulary, coining words that he should know better than to use – a famous word is “bigly” – and his very simple ways of expressing relatively complex ideas regarding commerce and conflict, impact our assessment of his intelligence. [JF note: As I understand it, there is a reasonable chance that Trump intended to say “big league” as opposed to “bigly.” Still...]

I know liberals who have thought GW Bush was stupid, largely because of how he expressed himself, as well as his failure to explore his errors. Bush’s failure to reflect concerned me more than any sense of his presumed intelligence.I am much more confident in President “I screwed up,” than I was with President “Mistakes were made.”

Reagan, too, was given to expressing his ideas in uncomplicated ways. Some would suggest that this indicated a talent for communication, not a deficiency in sense or judgement. No one spoke of Romney as unintelligent (nerdy, awkward, maybe, but these are not intellectual flaws). And I know many republicans who seem to believe that democrats are either stupid or naïve.

It does go both ways, and all you have to do is listen to the patronizing tone many republicans take on foreign policy pronouncements, “their” turf. Sarah Palin remarked last week on President Obama’s stupidity, but Obama’s intelligence and patriotism are often impugned.   

My assessment of intelligence is related to one’s willingness to learn. The Atlantic has covered the work of Carol Dweck in the past. Her research on growth vs fixed mindset is more related to efficacy, but I believed that it is also useful in understanding an individual’s willingness to learn new skills and information.

The ability to synthesize novel ideas or new skill sets says a great deal about individuals. One problem that many people who are employed in low-skilled occupations that later are outsourced or disappear, is that whether for lack of interest or lack of opportunity, they had not thought to acquire new skills. Does this mean they are unintelligent? No. It means that they were not interested or sufficiently foresighted to understand that tomorrow might require different information than today provided. Somehow, their plan was to win (or survive) and that didn’t work out. Lacking the interest in a Plan B, they were stuck.

The same is reflected in my understanding of Trump. He is not doing much differently now than he ever did. He speaks without much thought or reflection, because that has worked for him in the past. He is mostly skilled at expressing himself in terms of his personal interpretation of wealth and therefore, success. And it may work with some voters.

My concern with Trump is that he doesn’t seem to have information that a President ought to have at his or her disposal, or at least, he doesn’t express his knowledge base in public fora. He has not explained how his policies will work. He does not indicate that his understanding of the global economy is more than transactional, and his foreign policy interests appear to be limited. His vision is that America will win, win, win. He has not explained what he has learned so far, how he will achieve his vision, how he will work with others on a global scale. Maybe has a plan for doing this, but he has not shared any inkling of this plan with the voters, and some of us need that information.  

What has he learned, as an American, an adult, a man, a father, a business person, and how does this presumed growth translate into his potential leadership? The answer to that question is much more interesting and useful to me than how “intelligent” Trump may or may not be.  

What if he loses?

What can we expect after Trump loses the November election? Yes, I do believe that he will lose because I believe that there are enough voters with enough intelligence to sufficiently dread the consequences of a Trump win. I suspect that in the privacy of the voting booth not even the Senate Majority Leader or the Speaker of the House will vote for him despite what they are saying publicly.

So when he loses, what does his past behavior lead us to expect from him?

Of course, we should expect him to go to court, all the way to the Supreme Court. He will claim that the election was “rigged” against him, etc., etc. It will be as if one of the hypertrophied personae of professional wrestling were to try to rekindle the Bush-Gore court fight of 2000. The main difference this time will be that there won't be a gentleman Al Gore present to halt the match in order to save the union. One can imagine that Trump will try to summon the resources of the GOP to support his fight.

The story line of this court case will, naturally, feature the ethnicity of all the judges who rule on it. Will any of them be Mexican? Or Muslim? When this case lands in the Supreme Court, will it be paralyzed in a 4-to-4 tie? I like to imagine that the distinguished justices, ladies and gentlemen all, will also have the wisdom and decency to save the union.

On this last point, the Supreme Court was lastingly shamed by the results-oriented politicking of its Bush v. Gore decision. (You don’t have to believe me on this: turn to the dissent from the redoubtable Justice John Paul Stevens, who said: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear.  It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”) If the reader’s scenario came to pass, I would like to imagine, with him, that the current Supreme Court, in its full eight-member majesty, would decide  it was time to re-assert its role as “impartial guardian of the rule of law.”  

The dissenting opinion in your “Does Trump Think?” column (part three) was misguided in a lot of ways but brought up an interesting point. There’s something that I think could inform how people who think Trump is truly dangerous (like myself) choose to engage with the situation.  

Liberals (in general—not you or your readers in particular) have a hard time reconciling why Trump supporters can’t see how truly vacuous and without substance he is. Obviously the primary responsibility for this lies with those supporters, but we could be playing a much bigger part in bringing them to the light if our credibility weren't somewhat shattered. And we made that bed.  

Republicans for about 25 years have thrown knee-jerk insults at Democrats that all relate to elitism and common sense. Liberals’ complement to this tendency is to insult the intelligence of conservatives. Ronald Reagan was stupid, George Bush was stupid, and Sarah Palin was stupid. George Bush made bad decisions and was not ridiculed as ineffective or poorly informed but as an absolute imbecile. (I read a somewhat silly study where someone had attempted to estimate presidential IQs by statements in the public record and Bush was on the low end of presidents with a 135—which is borderline genius level IQ.)

This is obviously a silly undertaking, but it illustrates the point that a person who we reflexively insult and call an absolute idiot is probably an incredibly intelligent and competent man who just didn't do his best work as president.)  Sarah Palin is another case of a clearly intelligent and savvy woman who was woefully unprepared but ridiculed as stupid. [JF note: as I wrote many times during his tenure, I thought that George W. Bush was not “stupid” in any normal sense. Rather I thought he had a combination of ignorance, in the sense of not being broadly informed; lack of curiosity, which limited his ability to correct the ignorance problem; and a desire to be, or at least seem, decisive, rather than risk seeming “hesitant” or “vacillating.” The combination was toxic in the rush toward war in Iraq.]

We have now cried wolf.  Someone has now come along who is so obviously completely without the mental equipment to do this job and our criticism falls on deaf ears.  We have taught his supporters that we can't be trusted to make that assessment objectively.

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3. And finally, a reader on different standards for racism and sexism, and on the line between what is considered “stupid” and what is called “evil”:

Trump and his followers say they feel silenced. They’re not wrong. I mean, their First Amendment rights are clearly still intact, but apart from that, it’s certainly true that one of the most likely things you’ll encounter if you try to say something racist is the command to hush.

What happens when the command to hush fails? Well, apparently what happens is that polite society screws up its nose and then says, airily, “You don’t mean that.”

“You don’t mean that” is what you say to your toddler when he says he hates Uncle Bob. It’s what you say to your 15-year-old daughter when she tells you she’s moving out. In short, it’s what you say if you want to silence and patronise.

But the fascinating thing about this new form of attempted silencing is that it actually helps racist people rather than hindering them. Trump doesn’t have to dog-whistle; he can just whistle and then a bunch of well-meaning people will explain that he didn’t actually mean to whistle per se, he only wanted the attention.

So much dodging around the idea of racism! Trump doesn’t mean that; he’s just saying it to make people talk about him. His followers don’t really believe that of their own accord; they’re being led astray. It’s okay, none of these people actually think. I mean, wouldn’t it be dreadful if they could think, and they chose to think that?

It’s instructive to look at the differences between the way we treat racism, in this regard, and the way we treat sexism. It’s much rarer for sexism to be classified as something perpetrated only by stupid people.

That’s because we view racism through the lens of class. Racism is seen as being primarily perpetrated by poor people, whereas sexism implicates rich and poor alike. This happens, I think, because rich white people can avoid black people much more easily. [JF note: through spelling details and other touches, I think this note is not from an American. I think that people raised in the U.S. would know that the more precise phrasing would be, “rich white people can avoid poor black people more easily — and can avoid poor whites as well.”) Rich people can take advantage of a societal structure that pushes black people away for them. [JF: again, I would add “poor.”] They don’t have to put any effort in, and can thus absolve themselves of any responsibility.

If we truly believe ourselves to be thinkers, who judge the world after careful consideration rather than knee-jerk reactions, we should question this classism that drives the way we paper over racism.

Trump’s supporters are not just being blindly led. Like many capitalist Americans, they like the idea of a world in which there are “winners” and “losers.” They like that world even better if they, and people who look like them, are given an automatic leg up towards the “winner” category. That’s not exactly stupid. It’s just evil.

One morning a while back I found myself lying in bed (having awoken long before the alarm was going to go off) thinking about this and came up with a kind of psychological routine that I imagine Trump follows over and over again. I imagined him guided by a personal mantra: “Inflate, Ingratiate, Intimidate.”

I don’t imagine he reflects on any of this much. I think he has “way of life” that he believes in and that he believes is or ought to be the American Way of Life, but I don’t think he’s ever reflected much on any other way of being in the world or in relation to others than that which is captured in (a) Doer and Done-To and (b) Inflate, Ingratiate, Intimidate as needed.

For more in the topic of how Trump’s mind works, I refer you to this section from the wonderful book The Growth of the Mind And the Endangered Origins of Intelligence, by Stanley Greenspan, M.D. (with Beryl Lieff Benderly, 1997, Perseus Books). This is found on pages 165-167:

I noted earlier the phenomenon of projection, in which one person ascribes his own feelings to  another. An even more powerful though less recognized tendency, I believe, is the projection not simply of emotions or attitudes but of one’s own mental structure and level of awareness onto other people.

A person able to reflect in at least some emotional areas may assume that everyone else can do the same. This phenomenon is especially apparent in literary characters whose capacities for self-reflection are more similar to the author’s than to that of a typical person in the situation in question. Hamlet’s soliloquy about the value of existence surely reflects Shakespeare’s own matchless ability to translate feelings into words. In the voice of Huck Finn we hear Mark Twain’s moral reasoning about the fate of Jim. Outside of literature we might expect a boy like Huck to act at the decisive moment for reasons he does not understand and a despondent man to sink wordlessly into a morass of despair.

Many adults probably cannot reflect on their feelings to a significant degree, and many who can do so only in certain areas…. The ideal of the perfectly reflective human is about as illusory as the ideal of the perfectly fit or healthy one -- the person whose weight, blood pressure, cholesterol level, blood count, eyesight, and the rest -- match the medical textbook model of the human body. Each of us has some physical flaws and weaknesses. Ideals of good health, or perfect weight and lipid levels, of good vision and a vigorous heart remain, however, goals that we can all keep in mind as we live our daily lives.

Where exactly do we stand on the ladder of the developmental stage? Clinical experience suggests that most of us operate in a less than optimal way. I would estimate that only a minority of adults, probably no more than 20 to 30 percent, function at the higher levels… The rest range from those who can label feelings but can’t easily see connections among them through those who react to life with polarized affects to those who live mostly in a world of behavioral discharge in which feelings are coterminous with actions or physical states. Finally, there are those who live at a level in which thinking, behavior, or both are quite disorganized….

The measure of a person’s mental functioning is how she responds to a wide range of challenges and how stable her responses remain in stress or crisis. Is she able to maintain reflectiveness when she is hurt, scared, insulted, disappointed, rejected, worried, exhausted, or rushed [or adored, worshipped, or idealized]? Or does she slip back into rigid forms of responding, polarized thinking, or concrete action modes?..

In my clinical practice I often find it useful to reflect in a particular way on what is happening in the conversations I have with my patients. I invite them to reflect on this with me and to also learn to reflect in this particular way on conversations they have with others. The question guiding this way of reflecting is, “Am I doing something To, With, or For you?”…

Collaboration involves doing something With others. Seduction involves doing something To others while fooling them into believing it’s something we’re doing With them and/or For them. Good leadership involves all three, wisely and judiciously deployed, in the service of the leader’s community, organization, or team.

Trump is profoundly impaired in his capacity to Do With others. He cannot collaborate in any meaningful way with others. He can, very effectively, seduce others into thinking he is collaborating and doing something With them but I’m pretty sure he’s actually doing something To them….

I see his psychology as highly organized around the ambition to be in the Doing To Others position in all relationships. I see him as being able to effectively mimic Doing For and Doing With behavior—so effectively that he actually feels he is sincere even when he is plainly not—and use this mimicry in his pursuit of the Doing To position.

What’s most frightening to me in all of this has to do with what Trump’s effectiveness in winning the GOP nomination suggests has happened to the GOP and to our society at large.

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For the record, here is a response from a reader offended by the whole idea of wondering whether Trump really thinks:

Do your correspondents not have any self-consciousness? Do they not hear themselves? “I went to college so I’m smart. Trump voters didn’t go to college so they’re stupid. Hillary went to Yale Law School so she’s really smart and should be president. Trump went to Penn but only got in because of his father so he’s dumb.” [JF note: Disagree. The objection to Trump is based on the vacuity of what he actually says.]

But these people really believe this shit, apparently. I won’t bother trying to tell you how smart I am. But the guy who fixes your car is as smart as these people, with the bonus that he deals with physical reality, and doesn’t get paid if your car doesn’t work.

The idea that “blue state” people deal in sophisticated analytical thinking “like a surgeon” is pretty ridiculous. (Aside: This person is not smart enough to understand what surgeons do. It’s mostly just like fixing a car, but since you can die it’s done by high IQ college graduates rather than somewhat above average IQ high school graduates.) They mostly deal with soft abstracts where things are only subjectively right. Hillary probably scores pretty high on an IQ test, but even the top law schools are only teaching what the socially approved answers are, which change regularly.

Trump is not talking to you. There is no point for him to try to communicate with you because you wouldn’t support him under any circumstances so he doesn’t bother. If Jeb was now the nominee, the candidate who worked the hardest to make himself acceptable to the left, you would still be tearing him apart. [JF note: No. If Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, or John Kasich were the nominee, I would hope their side didn’t win, because I disagree with the current GOP stand on domestic policy, foreign policy, environmental and climate policy, budget policy, military policy, judicial appointments, and so on. But I would never suggest that these people were grossly unqualified for office, which is the case with Trump. I was glad that Barack Obama won re-election over Mitt Romney, because I preferred Obama’s policies. But no sane person could suggest that Romney was unqualified by background or unfit by temperament to be president, which again is true of Trump. Sarah Palin is much more knowledgeable (really) and would be a better president than Trump.]

So all the nice, respectable people think Trump is dumb and evil. So what? We don't care. What about this don’t you understand? I would really try to explain it to you if you really wanted to know.  

I won’t respond in kind, to this reader who writes in under a pseudonym, because I would regret doing so. I’ll say: consider the evidence and judge for yourself.

A shorter dissent:

Its obvious you think Trump is an idiot. Do you have a billion dollars and a smokin hot wife? I didn’t think so....so who really is the stupid one?

True, I don’t have a billion dollars …  

To be sure, these guys would laud analytical thinking in their surgeon in the hours before going under the knife, but the culture only rewards that kind of thinking in certain times and situations (generally scientific) and scorns it when applied to the moral questions of daily life that our current politics turns on. Questions of morals or fairness or justice should be resolved, in their minds, by “common sense,” informed by family, local culture, and religion. (And untangling that from race is nearly impossible.)

I'm painting with a broad brush, but in these enclaves, it’s just good common sense that (pick your Other) blacks / Mexicans / Muslims are different and often dangerous. Trump tells them they don’t have to deny that core knowledge and cover it up anymore with “politically correct” language. They don’t want to change their thinking. They don’t want to swap what they know emotionally about right and wrong for some broader but colder perspective.

I believe Hillary will win because enough people, including other factions of Republicans, think that the job of President requires a set of credentials more akin to a surgeon than a crowd-pleaser at Gilley’s. But that Gilley’s crowd—they don’t want Trump to “think,” at least not in the way you and I think of thinking.

P.S. If I could footnote my broad brush statements above, I’d direct you to a fascinating book by Kieran Egan called The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. He describes how rigorous high school and college education changes a person’s worldview. It’s the “why” behind the values divide we often see in political polling between more educated and less-educated voters.

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From a reader who grew up in the U.S. and now lives in Europe:

I agree with some who assert that what Trump says does not matter that much to his supporters. Or maybe by “not saying much” while he’s talking, Trump, deliberately or otherwise, leaves plenty of room for his audience to interpret his words any way they want to. (Isn’t this what clever Gypsy fortune tellers are supposedly good at?)

What Trump says does not make sense, ever, in terms of putting forth ideas. But Trump is not attempting to put forth ideas. Trump is attempting to put forth Trump. At that, Trump has so far been very successful.

We need to keep in mind what Trump might be thinking about, what questions Trump is asking himself. I believe Trump only asks himself one question, or variations on one question: What is good for Trump? This is not a revelation. But some of us seem to forget this when Trump starts talking. It is we who are addicted to making sense of communication, we who insist that people “make sense.” But we err when we assume that people are trying to make sense with their words.

Trump may possibly not be thinking. Or he may be thinking a lot. But if Trump is not thinking, then we have a lot to answer for explaining how he has succeeded thus far. For what does it say about the ability of people around him to think, if he so consistently has thwarted some supposedly capable people?

Trump is not a complicated creature. He is distinctive, but not unique, in his selfishness. But I think it’s best we keep in mind what his motivations are. On that basis, Trump, for me, is indeed doing something we can call thinking.

Like a drug addict whose tolerance increases and requires a larger and larger dose to get the same effect, Trump’s need for attention keeps growing larger and larger. He's pretty much at the pinnacle now, with just about the entire world fixated on him, and in order to keep getting his fix, he needs to keep saying crazy stuff to stay in the headlines.

Like most addicts he’ll eventually overdo it, come crashing down, and hit bottom. If this is actually the case, it’s not so much the presidency he’s interested in for its own sake; it would merely be a vehicle for him to pursue his addiction to its logical extreme.

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Finally, a reader disagrees with an item in which I said: “A real president, or real presidential candidate, would be informed enough to know that Muslim immigrants to the U.S. have been notable for their assimilation, not the reverse.”

The reader writes:

I believe you are misconstruing the meaning here. You are taking Trump far too much at his word.

Trump is not thinking, these American Muslims don’t assimilate therefore they are an attractive target. He is not thinking at all. He is very informed about Muslim immigrants. His hair specialist is one, Mohammad Ali Ivari, and surely he knows many others. He simply is not thinking at all.

Journalists, yourself included, need to stop taking him at his word. His points are not thought-out commentary; they are simply the free-form stylings of an ignoramus who is seeking self-aggrandizement. You are giving his words too much weight to consider that reflect a sincere and informed judgement. They are simply the ramblings of a man who only knows what he read in today’s paper and what his gut says his audience wants to hear.

A silver lining of this dark political moment: a lot of people around the world are thinking seriously about the dynamics of American politics and the info-ecology that underlies it.

Unfortunately, the Republican party is about to nominate a man who is not one of these people. And the “respectable” leaders of the Vichy Republican camp — Ryan, McConnell, Priebus, McCain, Rubio, Christie, Huntsman, Gingrich, now Roger Ailes — are still lining up behind him.

We know, watching Amistad and Glory and Gettysburg, that slavery would soon end. They didn’t. (I recently revisited The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and was astonished at how DuBois—a maximalist disinclined to accommodate the status quo—assumed that the struggle for integration and civil rights was unlikely to begin, even haltingly, for another century.)  

We know that the Know-Nothings and the America Firsters would come to nothing; they didn’t. We know that the Bund and the Anarchists would be squibs, that Eugene Debs and George Wallace would not get traction.  They didn’t.

The time capsule reminds us that—sooner than we can imagine—this struggle will be a history lesson. It will soon take an act of will to remember that the nature of that lesson was not always self-evident. The Founding Fathers thought long and hard about a candidate like Trump, and the danger that could be posed by a short-fingered vulgarian was seldom far from their minds. Ancient democracies had failed when faced with such men: Alcibiades, Sulla, Cataline, Clodius, Octavian. Designing a democracy that would not succumb was their explicit intent. (John Adams, I think, was never comfortable that they had done enough.)

But, even if (as I fully expect) the center holds and Trump will soon take his deserved place in the pantheon of political parables—joining George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, Charles Lindbergh, John Calhoun, Neville Chamberlain, Pierre Laval—we’ll need to recapture that terrible moment when, it seemed, Trump could conceivably win.

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As the campaign has ground on, Donald Trump has changed from entertaining oddity to genuine menace. Lest there be any doubt: I believe him to be less qualified by background and knowledge than any other major-party nominee in U.S. history, and more dangerous by temperament than anyone who has previously been this close to power. I have disagreed deeply with some American presidents — George W. Bush, to choose an obvious example, with his Iraq war policy, the torture regime and Guantanamo, and economic management. But I never doubted for a minute that Bush took the job seriously and was doing his best.

Nothing about Trump is serious. It would be a grave failure of American democracy, which would be laughed at and worried about in every corner of world, and a serious (though likely not fatal) threat to its ongoing viability for Trump to gain power.

So I’m not just puffing a pipe and sipping a sherry as I contemplate the slide toward the abyss.

The question is how journalism can be most useful, in these circumstances. I don’t think anything the Atlantic publishes is going to shake Trump’s support among his enthusiastic base. There are a certain number of states he is going to carry. The points of potential leverage are, first, the Vichy Republicans (Ryan, McConnell, Priebus, Rubio, et al), to try to demonstrate the danger and the historical stain they’ll bear for accommodating Trump; and everyone else, to demonstrate the stakes. Those are the audiences I have in mind.

This is the most useful way I, personally, know to lay out the case. And meanwhile, I’m trying to make a record, for later on, of what it was like while there was a chance he could succeed.  This started on a whim last month. We’ll see how and whether it should continue or evolve.

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Another reader has a different objection—and agreement:

#18—I would give Trump a pass on the accusation of racism in his reference to Warren as “Pocahantas.” 

He’s not characterizing her ethnicity.  He’s making a sarcastic comment about her alleged effort to use her fractional ethnic heritage (whether real or fictional) to get favored treatment in admissions to college or law school (I forget which).  His point is that she’s not really Native American.  It’s immature and silly, but not really racist.  Of course, I have no doubt that Trump is a racist.  Who knows what he really thinks, but words and actions are all we ever have to go on.
 
#19—How many things are wrong with Trump’s tweets following the tragedy in Orlando?  There’s the narcissism: the self-congratulatory pat on the back while at the same time claiming he doesn’t want the pat.

There’s the immediate assumption, before any meaningful investigation or facts, that this is “radical Islamic terrorism” (ignoring the possibility that this was just one fucked-up, angry mentally unstable guy).  

There’s the nonsense about the ban, which would have been irrelevant here since the perpetrator was US born and a citizen.  

There’s the attack on Obama as being weak and ineffectual, which, even if true, would have been completely irrelevant to this situation.

There’s the beyond absurd complaint about Obama refusing to refer to “radical Islam”.  Obama and others have explained the tactical reasoning behind the language they use and don’t use so many times that there can be no doubt that most Republican elected officials know why he doesn’t use those terms.  When they criticize him for this they’re just being dishonest and playing politics.  Is Trump aware of the thinking behind the Administration’s choice of language?  He should be.  

There’s the “it’s just the beginning”, which is designed to create fear.

Finally, there’s his reference to “toughness and vigilance”, as though our intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies aren’t there already.  (Meaningless words, anyway.)
 
More generally, two aspects of this are highly offensive:  First, that Trump is spouting off even before all of the facts are in.  Second, that he’s exploiting this tragedy for his own personal political gain.  I note that that’s different than exploiting the event to make a political point, such as to advocate for gun control.  Some may consider that inappropriate, but it’s certainly less offensive than what Trump has done here.

Some Sanders supporters may be tempted to stay home or park their vote with Gary Johnson's Libertarians. That would really be tragic if it helps elect Trump. One thing to watch is whether Johnson can gain the 15 per cent poll support needed to participate in the main TV debates. Third parties can play spoiler roles in U.S. elections: Teddy Roosevelt helped elect Taft; Ross Perot helped elect Bill Clinton; Nader, Bush; etc. 

Of course, it’s just as likely that the Libertarians will hurt the Trump GOP ticket. Johnson’s social liberalism (e.g. legalizing pot) comes along with a bunch of extreme economic laissez-faire and isolationism.
 
Sanders seems to be hoping that something like an email indictment will derail Clinton before the convention, but it's more likely the delegates would draft Biden in that event. That would increase the likelihood of progressive desertion or third-party votes with potentially disastrous consequences. 

Five months of roller-coaster drama ahead, I think.

***

3) What “he’s a Mexican!” really meant. A reader originally from the UK, now part of the tech industry in the US, writes about Trump’s much-discussed comments on Judge Curiel:

My reaction to Trump’s ‘Mexican’ interview on CNN (thanks to time capsule #12) was that he was being intentionally doubled-tongued. He was pandering to a racist audience with the appearance of racism, while careful choosing his words so as to be able to later make a defence a la “look closely at what I said—it wasn’t racist.” Specifically, his logic would be:

1. The judge has strong ties to Mexico
2. The judge is proud of those ties
3. I am building a wall to keep out Mexicans
4. Such a wall is an affront to Mexican pride
5. Any person proud of Mexico would be affronted by my action
6. The judge is a proud Mexican, so would be affronted by my action
7. A judge who is affronted by my actions could not give me a fair trial

He wouldn't use those words, I’m sure. But that’s the “defence back-up plan” I heard in that interview. Of course point #7 is logically flawed, but not in way that is directly racist.

Specifically the non-sequitur at 00:17 where he says, “Look, he’s proud of his heritage. I’m building a wall,” is otherwise suspicious. 

What he pathologically and knowingly ignored is that the very appearance of being racist causes the same harm to society as actually being racist. I.e. when one appears to be racist in front of an audience that may include people who are marginally racist, one re-enforces their racism. Among an audience of 300 million that harm is huge. No amount of later back-pedaling the logic can undo that.

What he clearly mis-judged was that for a presidential candidate the very appearance of being racist, no matter it's potential back-pedalability, would also be harmful to his campaign. 

Thanks to all.