Judy Myers explains why she is growing uncomfortable with the Time Capsule approach:

I share your fear of what is happening in our society that would allow Trump to become the elected candidate of a major party. I hope the Time Capsule accomplishes your intended goal.

As you may have expected, there is a “but.” It is your tone of amazement that these things are happening, and what I see as your over-reach in describing some of them as horrifying in their uniqueness.

Take your Capsule number 69. Why did Mr. Rucker conduct his interview with a television facing the interviewee? Why did you not list the Trump interview with Bob Woodward, which I think was the best Trump has done?  (It seemed to me that Woodward was trying to have a discussion with Trump, not sandbag him.)

I accept that your intent is to document the Trump campaign, but it would be just as easy to do to Hillary Clinton what you are doing to Trump. Mrs. Clinton has important weaknesses, and it would be just as easy to characterize her in the way that you characterize Mr. Trump. To take just one example, she is having just as impossible a time explaining her email problem as he is having in addressing what we see as his defects.

I live surrounded by Trump supporters. Many are giving up on Democratic leadership as being ineffective in supporting regular people trying to live a regular life. Some of these people see President Obama’s election as a cataclysmic event that destroyed their belief that other Americans shared their view. (Many others have written about this, so I won’t.)

I suggest that it is not just Trump; that you are claiming objectivity but your bias is showing. I suggest that Bush 43 was seriously unprepared for the presidency. I suggest that his attention span and depth of knowledge and understanding of presidential issues was not that different from Trump. I suggest that Clinton is just as resistant to outside information as Trump, and in fact most people who reach such heights of power are similarly resistant. I suggest that Trump has raised important issues to the point that we are talking about them—letting business and power take so much is hurting workers. Comparing him to Clinton, his opposition to the TPP as it was constructed when it became a campaign issue, I want to oppose parts of it too. Yes, he is a self-involved blowhard. No, I don’t want his hand of the nation’s tiller.

In closing, I ask you to read this, “The Media’s Foolish Moralizing About Donald Trump,” by Damon Linker.

Whatever else is happening, we as a country have an opportunity for conversation now that some of our rifts are being openly discussed. Let's not blow it. To that end, I would like to see your writeup of what you heard in Texas and Kansas. I am down closer to the coast and to Mexico and the area you visited is very different from where I am. I am looking forward to your report on what you saw.

I appreciate Ms. Myers’s careful attention, and her taking the time to write in. Here is where and how I see the world differently from her:

• It might be worth emphasizing again the journalistic idea behind starting this Time Capsule series. Donald Trump’s rise is clearly an unusual moment in our public history. No one like him has gotten this close to the presidency in modern times—by which I mean, no one with his total lack of elective or public-office experience, no one as willing to dismiss norms of what nominees “can” and “cannot” say. My purpose, as set out from the start, is to lay down a real time record of what it was like as the country decided whether to make him its leader—and in particular, the ways in which he did depart from norms.
                                                                                 
• As I’ve explicitly said, I’m not imagining that I’m going to change a single voter’s mind. I personally think that Trump’s candidacy has been bad for our civic fiber—“the judge is a Mexican!”—and that a Trump presidency would be worse. But it’s a free country; people can choose as they want. I’m trying to document we know while making that choice.
                                                                                                 
• On a detailed point, I haven’t asked Philip Rucker, but I’ll bet you anything it was not his choice to have Trump looking back and forth at the TV while Rucker was trying to interview him. (One reason I say so: common sense. Another reason: in the transcript, Rucker keeps trying to draw Trump away from what Trump has glimpsed on TV.) And the reason why than transcript seemed significant is that, like the great majority of other long interviews by Trump, it was notable for its lack of sentence-by-sentence sustained argument or thought. It was also significant, as I mentioned, because it displayed Trump’s hair-trigger reaction to a plane crash he had seen, with an immediate, confident explanation that was probably wrong. This would be a very dangerous trait in an actual president.
                                                                                                 
• We move now to the realm of the subjective: I have spent a depressingly large share of my life paying close attention to the way public figures talk—when they are being interviewed, when they are extemporizing on the stump, when they’re battling opponents in debates, when they’re delivering formal speeches. There’s an enormous range among them: Bill Clinton would sound mesmerizing in a rally speech, but if you read the transcript, it would just look ordinary. Teddy Kennedy was a magnificent formal orator but could seem tongue-tied or even aphasic in some interviews. Ronald Reagan was amazingly consistent in his tone, discourse, and argumentative structure whether giving a speech or being interviewed. Bob Dole was notably different in his private wise-cracking mode and his stiffer formal presentations.
  
  They’re all individuals, and they’re all different. But in my experience, Trump is different from any of the rest of them. He knows less—about the government, about the world, about anything other than himself.
  
  Rick Perry got in trouble for a botched debate answer, but he could talk very well about his plans for Texas. Similarly for Dan Quayle, but I once interviewed him about American defense policy in the Pacific, and he was very erudite.
  
  I have never met Trump in person. But the transcripts of his interviews seem to belong in one category, and other public figures I’ve known (with their huge variation) in the other. I’m suggesting that he is different from other public figures, because in my judgment he is.
                                                                                                 
• By extension, I also disagree with the idea that you could apply just the same treatment to George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton. I didn’t vote for Bush, and I think his administration was one of the most destructive in our history. The Iraq war; torture and Guantanamo; the conditions leading to the great crash of 2008, these will always be part of his legacy. But I never doubted that he was a serious man, who took the office (that his father had also held) extremely seriously, and who was doing his best (in ways I disagreed with), and who recognized the gravity of the choices he would make. It was Bush who went to national mosque six days after the 9/11 attacks. It is impossible to imagine him responding to the Khan family the way Donald Trump did.
  
  As for Hillary Clinton, she is not a very good campaigner, as the world knows. It was foolish of her to set up her own server to begin with, and no one can understand why she doesn’t just say: This was a huge mistake, I’m sorry, let me answer any question about it for the next six hours, and then we’re done.
  
  But the idea that she is “just as resistant to outside information as Trump, and in fact most people who reach such heights of power are similarly resistant” is, in my judgment, just categorically wrong. The problem of getting honest judgments, bad news and all, once you become powerful is indeed a profound one. Every leader has grappled with it; it’s a theme of the origins of the Vietnam and Iraq wars, of political treatises from Machiavelli onward. But I am absolutely sure that Hillary Clinton would at least theoretically recognize it as a problem. I have seen no signal that Trump is aware of this peril at all.

That’s enough for now. Thanks for reading, and for writing in.

***

Note from a reader on the which-crash-was-it mystery:

The Trump interview was conducted on August 2, according to the editor's note, and the Dubai crash was early in the morning of August 3 EST.

I think the crash was probably the Flagstaff one August 2 involving a Piper Seneca -- which perhaps makes his engineering criticism more defensible than if it was a 777, but frankly makes his distraction even more extraordinary.

One person died in that crash, sadly, but it wasn't a huge news event like the Dubai incident.

And from another reader:

If he gets elected (shudder), I'm sure we'll see Divine Leader Kim Il Trump visiting Renton or Everett to "give guidance" to Boeing workers.

And from another staffer at Boeing:

Word is he’ll be visiting WA to raise money at the end of the month. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to ask him for advice on ways to use topology optimization to improve the design of 3D printed structures.

A reader in the Midwest makes a related point:

I have followed with great interest the chronicling of the Trump campaign for the historical record. My question to you is this: Is there any integrity left in the Republican party?

I have waited for months for one prominent Republican with real “skin in the game” to step up and say something and take a stand. Something along this line: “You know that I am a Republican, but I am an American first. And as an American, I cannot and will not support the nominee of our party. He is not qualified to be President of this country. If this costs me my position, so be it. Some things are more important!”

Is it too much to ask for just one person to have the balls to do this? And if it is too much, what does this say about our country?

***

A reader who has worked in Republican politics defends John McCain, who has condemned Trump’s statements but so far not Trump himself:

My own opinion is doing anything you can to defeat Trump and hold his enablers accountable is one’s a moral imperative as an American, an acid test of one’s character.  

That said you know that life is a balancing act and McCain is trying to win a GOP primary is a state with a hard-right GOP electorate. Have to give him a little latitude.  Also suspect that’s why he included this line, “...which I will have to answer at the Final Judgment...”— he knows it’s an acid test he's failing and will have to answer for, and it’s weighing on him.  

This reader goes on to say that the Republicans who should be judged most harshly are those who are not up for re-election themselves this year (unlike McCain) but are still riding the Trump Train.

***

From a lawyer on the West Coast:

I thought your term “Vichy Republican” was quite apt. I say this because I was recently watching the Ophuls documentary about France under the Nazi Occupation The Sorrow and the Pity. It does a masterful job of drawing out people on why they decided to resist or collaborate.

One thing that strikes me how many conservatives in 1940 France felt that “well, better Hitler than Blum.” Leon Blum being France’s first Jewish prime minister, who served at the head of a left-wing government in the period 1936-1938.  It just sounds a lot like the praise many conservatives of like Trump and Farange have for Putin and disdain for Obama …

***

A brief note on a potential silver lining:

Wouldn’t it be great if the Khans, Muslim-Americans, became the moral conscience of the nation during this election, with their dignity and eloquence and compassion?

***

And, finally for now, a much longer and more downbeat assessment:

It is becoming blatantly clear to me that the GOP is failing in one of its principal roles as a major political party: To filter out those elements which, at their root, would destroy those organic mechanisms which keep our democracy functioning.

Given how blatant and ever-increasingly obvious is the nature of Trump, why is it so hard for the country to realize what he represents?  Why did not our national immune system immediately recognize him for who/what he is and spit him out? The answer is that Ryan and McConnell and the Vichy Republicans, are validating Trump’s legitimacy, and have reneged on their fundamental duty leading a major political party.

And the GOP’s decay in performing this duty has been advancing for the last 20 years. In today’s NY Times, Lindsay Graham was quoted as saying in reference to Trump’s comments about the Khans,

“This is going to a place where we’ve never gone before, to push back against the families of the fallen. There used to be some things that were sacred in American politics — that you don’t do — like criticizing the parents of a fallen soldier, even if they criticize you,” Graham said.

At last! A Republican willing to say “YOU JUST CAN'T SAY SUCH THINGS!!”  And here's the thing:  It might have started sooner, perhaps Nixon, perhaps Goldwater; but in my mind it started with Newt Gingrich and the ‘94 Republicans who took power and dismantled the structural protections in Congress which fostered comity and collegiality among adversaries. Since that time, establishment Republicans started saying and doing things that political norms dictated that YOU JUST DON’T DO!  

Before that time, no matter how awful the opponent’s policies, the opponent was, nevertheless, a worthy adversary, chosen by worthy citizens who, despite your fervent disagreement with them, were your countrymen.  And starting in ‘94, establishment Republicans started disrespecting the elected representatives of the opposing party. And at that point, they moved from governing to open warfare. And each new incremental move into previously forbidden territory brought new standards of indecency and disrespect; to the point where the honor and patriotism of a proven, decorated war hero (John Kerry), the citizenship and faith of an elected president (Obama), the honor and patriotism of a former POW (McCain), and the fundamental integrity and worth of Congressional institutions (filibuster etc.), were all barriers which it is now acceptable to disregard. Things you just didn’t do, they did.

In a quick Google session I was unable to determine who first said it, but I’ve heard it attributed to Jung, that civilization is a thin veneer. We take for granted that the glue holding this democracy together is only as strong as the willingness of the participants to honor the glue. It’s remarkable how few people it would take to disregard the white lane markings of our highways and turn traffic into a snarl. We function because of our consensus that there are just some things that YOU DO NOT SAY, and there are just some things that YOU DO NOT DO. And since 1994, at least, the GOP, with very little assistance from the Democrats, has been saying and doing non-normative things; and this has empowered a large number of people to say and do non-normative things as a result.

The country depends on its political parties to scrub out the infectious elements; to make sure that, whatever candidates are put forward, at the root they will put the institutions and the norms that provide the glue for our democracy ahead of their ideological and power questing goals. I wonder how graciously GW Bush/Cheney would have responded to the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2000 had it gone the other way. And in the subsequent Congress, I wonder how graciously the Republicans would have allowed a President Gore to function had the result gone the other way. I wonder how normative the Republican response would have been had 9/11 happened on the watch of a Democratic president. Oh. Wait. BENGHAZI!!!!!

The GOP no longer puts the country, its institutions and its norms, ahead of party. And McConnell and Ryan and the Vichy Republicans are glaring truth of the long road down which they've come. Thank you, and Mr. and Mrs. Khan, for directly calling them out. We need the GOP.  We need a functioning, filtering, democracy glue-enhancing GOP. We haven’t had one since it started decaying during the first Clinton administration.

And what will happen when, the next time they nominate a candidate, they manage to hide the things that makes Trump so obvious? THAT’s what scares me most ...

Thank you for the Time Capsule series. I think a lot of the commentary from all over on Trump is missing the main question, however. The fundamental question is seldom what people do; the fundamental question is why they do it.

Any “rational” analysis of Trump will fail. (“Rational” in both the “logical utility” and in the “sane” sense.) He is not presenting a logical way for attaining real benefits, nor is he presenting himself as sane.

What he is selling is fear and anger. It is those two emotions, and just  the emotions, that his supporters want. They want to be deathly afraid of the world, and they want to use that fear to justify an all-consuming anger. They are not looking for justification for those emotions; they just want the emotions themselves.

If you see his supporters as masses of the frustrated and disenfranchised who are seeking a voice at the table of power, then it makes no sense. Anybody like that would not want to be lied to. They have been lied to too many times by the powerful. Trump is an obvious liar, and he is never going to do what he says is is going to do. Anyone who simply feels betrayed by the political process isn’t about to set themselves up to be betrayed again. Those types will simply stay home on election day like they always do.

There is no point going into who said it, but it was said that “people would rather believe a big lie than a small one.” Once you lie, and once you lie very very big, then you are in constant fear of being found out. The only possible face-saving response is to use the energy of that fear to violently insist that you are right.

Once you stand up in public and say you believe that the Earth is flat, then you simply can’t back down. The fear of ridicule is so great that the only way forward is to be angry at all attackers. That anger then becomes its own validity. It is an addiction, pure and simple. It is an addiction to strong empty feelings. No one believes that the Earth is flat because of any logical argument. They believe that the Earth is flat because the panic that is caused by believing that lie sustains their desired anger. And their anger is all they have and all they want. Believing the lie is a deliberate and calculated act to drum up an overriding state of blind emotion.

Trump’s big lies are the whole point of his appeal.

Hillary’s fault is that she makes small lies (about the e-mails and a lot else). Small lies can be proven to be false, and the small liar shown to be a fool. You can say that you believed her about the e-mails, and then be shown that that small lie was wrong, and then say that she is a scoundrel for fooling you like that.

But if you swallow a big lie, you can’t back down. Any backdown would be such a loss of face, that your identity won’t allow it. You get trapped in a world of fear of discovery and anger at your critics and you can’t get out.

Most importantly, however, most people don’t want to get out. Most importantly, most people get in that position on purpose. That is why they support Trump. They live off the anger that believing a big lie produces in them.

I hate to always be bringing this up, but every year 250,000 Americans die from medical mistakes. That is over 600 a day, every day, all year long. That is more than a fully loaded 747 crashing every day due to preventable errors.

And the Wall Street Journal reports that immigrants have a lower crime and incarceration rate than natural-born Americans.

Where were the teary-eyed speakers at the RNC talking about their loved ones killed by medical mistakes or by native-born American criminals? There are only a couple hundred thousand more of those to be found than the ones they trotted out. But that is only if you believe in the weight of evidence.

There is no either sane or utilitarian reason to put the fear of immigrant criminals or Islamic terrorists anywhere within the top 100 things to worry about in life. But that is not the point. The point isn’t in believing in the truth what that does for you. The whole point is in believing the lie and what that does for you.

***

Trump is giving his followers what they want and what they insist on: a big lie that will feed their anger. They want to be lied to so that they can be angry at those who call them liars. That is all they want in life, and Trump is delivering the goods. Trump isn’t doing this because he has some carefully calculated path to power on backs of his supporters. He is doing it because he is an idiot and can’t do anything else. He is just a meaningless tool of the times. The more he lies the more his supporters feed off the anger those lies cause and it goes on and on.

The “Vichy Republicans” are just along for the ride, knowing full well that all they want is power and that they will get it and find a way to cover themselves no matter what happens. As you know, in politics, losing is often the best choice, because then you get all of the talk and none of the responsibility.

It is all up to democracy. If most of the people want to be lied to so that they can be angry, then goodbye the good old U.S.A. If Hillary isn’t up to bringing out the vote, then that’s the end.

But Trump isn’t stopped by showing him to be a liar. That just feeds the beast. You don’t convince someone that the Earth isn’t flat by telling them that they are stupid. They want you to say that, so that they can get angry at you for saying that, and that anger is all they really wanted from the beginning. If you are angry enough you don't have to deal with anything else in the world. It is the cheapest and most powerful drug in the world. And once you are addicted, it is hard to stop. Once you are addicted you simply don't know how to do anything else. And you want more and more of it.

You narrow his support by giving his supporters a way out. I think the best way to stop him, as has been pointed out by others, is to simply insult him. That way he will wind it so far out that even his supporters will see the humor in it. Get him to trash talk more about the U.S. and start bringing in UFOs and it will all turn into stand-up comedy even to his supporters. A good laugh puts you in charge, and gets you out.

Either that, or he starts insulting pockets of his own supporters, and then they start wondering who is next. Get some surrogates to insult him in public, and trust he handles it badly. Not call him a liar, but actually insult him. He’s afraid of the very thing he does to others. That’s why he does it. Reagan would have put on that famous smile and say “there you go again.” Trump will probably loose it.

That and when the Trump U case comes up, he’ll be shown to be a small liar.

***

3) Roots of his appeal. A reader with another tip:

Another magazine [apart from The Atlantic!] I’ve recently discovered that has a lot of insightful articles is The American Conservative. Below is a link to a great article discussing the appeal of Trump to the white working class.

Yes, this interview with J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, is interesting and important. It intersects with the themes Deb and I have been covering, and we’ll return to it.

***

4) On Trump, Putin, and a bias toward chaos. Last for today:

I haven’t slept well since Trump’s RNC speech when it dawned me how close the alignment of Trump’s and Putin’s behavior and interests are. I plead that you dig deeper, much deeper. That you encourage your compatriots to uncover this connection.

In general, I am not a conspiracy believer, but Trump certainly is.  I believe that most of us see the world through the prism of our own beliefs. Therefore, Trump believes that the world is run and “won” by using fixers, by rigging the game. This has clearly been how he has operated his businesses and been his experience within New York real estate. Trump says as much in his acceptance speech. Putin has the power and inclination to help Trump fix or tilt our election—with cyber warfare (DNC email leaks?), terrorist attacks, and promoting social unrest.

Putin has been in a cold war with us for several years now and has become adept at using asymmetric warfare against democratic nations.  I expect there to be more fear-inspiring activity before and during the DNC, during the Rio Olympics and leading up to election day. Russia can facilitate terrorist groups, even fake terrorism through Chechen connections that can be passed off as ISIS. Russia could fake an Iranian or North Korean cyber attack on the US or an ally (Israel?). They can incite, even arm, the crazies in any democracy. The possibilities are many—arm some militant Black Panthers in the U.S., set off a few car bombs close to the election, send some anthrax around, release some Zika mosquitos, leak embarrassing and incendiary information.  

There will be an act of terror somewhere in the world practically every day to light up cable news and remind us how scared we should be, to keep our flag at half mast.

How else does the RNC and Trump’s victory speech make any sense? He’s tripled down on chaos. He wins the election only if the electorate is scared and all we want is “law and order.” Trump is not worried that his convention was a mess, that his party is not united or that he has no staff or ground campaign; this is a cable-news assault.

Russia helps make the chaos and get Trump elected. In exchange Russia gets the Ukraine, the Baltics, greatly weaken democracies and a narcissistic U.S. President that is prone to their manipulation.

Crazy? Yes. Is Trump crazy? Yes. I believe he is crazy enough that there could actually be a direct link between Putin and Trump. Either way, whether a real conspiracy or a confluence of toxic nationalistic waste streams the only vaccine is suspecting the truth before the fact.

Process note: the balancing act within our own household and inside my own mind, between the increasingly dire aspects of America’s national politics, and the fresh and encouraging developments in most other realms, is our own local reminder of the larger challenge of trying to make sense of the national condition.

Maybe I should just fall back on the principle that was so handy in China: Everything you could possibly say about the country is true — somewhere. Maybe I should call it schizophrenia or cognitive dissonance, rather than a balancing act. But most of all I should probably keep the balance in favor of on-the-road reporting, which usually has the virtue of being surprising in positive rather than negative ways.

Not a deal but a relationship. A reader responses to Time Capsule #49, on Trump’s willingness to walk away from a deal: “You always have to be prepared to walk”:

Trump really relishes deal-making and negotiations, and rightly so. The rules he plays by—regardless of whether they’re anyone else’s rules—appear to serve him well. What’s scary is that he seems to treat everything like a negotiation. As you point out, we don’t just have a deal with, say, Japan; we have a relationship. Relationships aren’t always easy, and the strongest ones require hard work to maintain.

It’s hard not to compare this to his marriages. We can’t just get divorced from Japan or South Korea or Estonia every so often and go start over with younger, seemingly more exciting allies.

***

The Cruz gamble:

I am a Texan and I despise Ted Cruz.

But he is one of the few to stand up to Trump. I have never voted for a Democrat for President, but this year will be the first. I would have hoped that Cruz would have done the right thing and clearly stated that as flawed as Hillary is, Trump is unfit for office. He did the next best thing.

I think it’s brilliant politics. What are the chances that Trump self-destructs before the election, or God help us as President? Very high, I’d say. Cruz can say he was right when it happens. Also, he sets himself up to run against Trump in Republican primaries in 2020 as the “I told you so” candidate. He could also run as as 3rd party candidate and get significant support as the only conservative in the race.