People will look back on this era in our history to see what was known about Donald Trump while Americans were deciding whether to choose him as president. Here’s a running chronicle from James Fallows on the evidence available to voters as they make their choice, and of how Trump has broken the norms that applied to previous major-party candidates. (For a Fallows-led, ongoing reader discussion on Trump’s rise to the presidency, see “Trump Nation.”)
Before anyone writes in to point it out: of course a public figure mis-pronouncing a certain place’s name, when visiting that place, doesn’t “matter” in any real sense. It usually just reflects a lack of local spot-knowledge. For instance, I know firsthand that you can make people in Ohio laugh by mis-pronouncing the name of their city Lima. I had thought it was leema, like the capital of Peru. Turns out it’s lyma, like the bean. Oops! And let’s not even get into Louisville.
But Donald Trump’s wading into the Nevada morass does matter, because it’s a perfect small window into the mind and temperament of the man. The brief clip below is remarkable; explanation below, after you take a look.
What’s remarkable here? It’s this trifecta:
Trump is totally wrong. If he had bothered to ask, he could have learned in one second that locals don’t say Ne-VAH-da, with a broad a in the middle. They say Ne-VA-da, with an a like the one in cat or hat. What’s the reason? It’s just how they say it, much as Willamette, Oregon, and Houston Street in New York are pronounced in ways different from what outsiders might assume.
Trump doesn’t know he’s wrong, or care that he might be. Most people understand the difference between what they know, and what they’re assuming or guessing or considering more-likely-than-not. The most sophisticated thinkers in any field, from finance to science to sports and any place in between, try always to wonder about what they don’t know, and about what questions they’re not asking. No less a figure than Donald Rumsfeld memorably summed up this concept when talking about the “Known Unknowns” and so on. By contrast Trump, as you’ll see, is absolutely certain in this thing he’s absolutely wrong about.
And still he is a bully and jerk about it. Trump’s approach to this intrinsically trivial point is the same as his approach to everything else: He’s right, you’re wrong, and people who disagree with him are losers. His tone in the clip above is identical to his snap judgment, as reported back in June in installment #26, that a missing EgyptAir flight must have been brought down by terrorists. The weeks have gone on; no responsible official has said for sure what happened; but Trump immediately knew: “What just happened? A plane got blown out of the sky. And if anybody thinks it wasn’t blown out of the sky, you’re 100% wrong, folks, OK? You’re 100% wrong.”
Again, saying Ne-vah-da doesn’t matter. But the combination shown in this clip does: it’s the toxic mixture of ignorance, certitude, and bullying. This is just about the opposite of what you’d like to see in a Commander in Chief. Yet with less than 33 days to go, nearly all “responsible” Republicans from Paul Ryan on down still say, He’s fine! Please make him the most powerful man in the world.
Because it’s more than 100 entries in the past, I’m recycling some of the “news analysis” part of the earlier post about Trump’s rush-to-judgment on the EgyptAir disappearance. The passing months have only heightened concern about Trump’s decision-making and knowledge-weighing abilities.
From the original post:
The hardest part of a president’s job is assessing unclear, murky, and contradictory evidence, which is the kind of evidence in most big decisions a president makes. The clearer, easier choices get made by someone else. Real presidents become aware of and burdened by the gap between “probability” and “certainty.” They try to remain aware of the spectrum between choices they must make quickly, even knowing that available information is inadequate, and others where the wisest option is to buy time. John Kennedy kept asking for more time and more options during the Cuban Missile Crisis. George W. Bush rushed with uninformed haste toward his decision to invade Iraq.
Trump was the opposite of deliberative or presidential in rushing toward his conclusion about the EgyptAir crash last month, as he was this month about the ever-more-tangled situation of the Orlando mass-slaughter. Trump immediately declared the shooting an ISIS operation justifying new controls on Muslim immigrants. “It’s war, it’s absolute war!” he said. This weekend Dina Temple-Raston of NPR reported that intelligence officials and investigators had told her they were “becoming increasingly convinced that the motive for this attack had very little — or maybe nothing — to do with ISIS.” In both of these cases, terrorism might end up having been a significant cause. But that’s not clear right now, and it certainly was not during Trump’s immediate spasm of “you’re 100% wrong!” Remember, too, that the Orlando shooting was the occasion for his saying that President Obama was “prioritizing the enemy” by not cracking down on Muslim immigrants. Trump’s responses to both emergencies — Egyptair, and Orlando — might be considered old news, except for this weekend’s reminder of the real-world complexities of each, which real leaders would need to reckon with.
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In one case only has Trump publicly reflected on the difficulty of judging complex evidence and probabilities: the decision by Cincinnati zoo officials to kill the gorilla into whose cage a toddler had fallen. This issue Trump addressed with genuine feeling, depth, and expressed awareness of tradeoffs. Other issues, from whether the U.K. should leave the European Union to whether Japan should build nuclear weapons, require no apparent deliberation at all.
Etching by J.A.J. Wilcox of James Russell Lowell, one of the Atlantic's founders. Five years after this portrait was made, he and the other editors made their first endorsement: of Abraham Lincoln for president. Today his successors have made another endorsement, only the third in the past 159 years.Wikimedia Commons
In previous installments I’ve mentioned editorial statements for Hillary Clinton, and against Donald Trump, from unexpected sources. For instance, the Cincinnati Enquirer, which had endorsed only Republicans for the past century. Or the Arizona Republic, which had never endorsed a Democrat. Or the Dallas Morning News, with nearly as long a pro-Republican history. Or USA Today, which said “don’t vote for Trump” after never before endorsing any candidate.
For the record, I should note the latest in this series. It is our own Atlantic magazine, which today for only the third time in its 159-year history has endorsed a presidential candidate. In 1860, three years after the magazine’s founding, its editors endorsed Abraham Lincoln. One hundred and four years later, in 1964, they made a statement against Barry Goldwater, which meant recommending Lyndon B. Johnson.
Now, with 33 days and a few hours before the election, the magazine has made another endorsement. Like most of the newspaper editorials mentioned above, it is forthright in recommending a vote for Hillary Clinton. But its motivating “this time, it’s different” spirit is deadset opposition to Donald Trump.
Since I had nothing to do with writing this editorial, I can freely recommend that you read the whole thing. To me, it’s a powerful and eloquent statement of what American public life is supposed to stand for, and why those values would be imperiled by a President Trump. I think the final two paragraphs deserve reading with special care.
First this next-to-last paragraph, about how Trump has exploited and perverted genuine economic discontent in the country:
Our endorsement of Clinton, and rejection of Trump, is not a blanket dismissal of the many Trump supporters who are motivated by legitimate anxieties about their future and their place in the American economy. But Trump has seized on these anxieties and inflamed and racialized them, without proposing realistic policies to address them.
And then the conclusion, on how the Atlantic’s editors can make this endorsement and still be true to the magazine’s original promise to be “the organ of no party or clique”:
Our interest here is not to advance the prospects of the Democratic Party, nor to damage those of the Republican Party. If Hillary Clinton were facing Mitt Romney, or John McCain, or George W. Bush, or, for that matter, any of the leading candidates Trump vanquished in the Republican primaries, we would not have contemplated making this endorsement. We believe in American democracy, in which individuals from various parties of different ideological stripes can advance their ideas and compete for the affection of voters. But Trump is not a man of ideas. He is a demagogue, a xenophobe, a sexist, a know-nothing, and a liar. He is spectacularly unfit for office, and voters—the statesmen and thinkers of the ballot box—should act in defense of American democracy and elect his opponent.
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Will this statement change a single voter’s choice? Let alone make any conceivable difference in the decisive Electoral College count?
Maybe not to the first question, and almost certainly not to the second. But that doesn’t matter. It’s the right thing to do. Donald Trump is making this a dark time in our nation’s public life. People who oppose what he has done, and could do, need to stand up for what they believe, and for what is at stake.
Unfortunately, Charlie Chan was not available for an interview with Fox. (Wikimedia)
Whatever happens to him at the polls 34 days from now, Donald Trump has already deeply changed public discourse in America. It’s not just what he says; it’s what a year’s worth of Trump’s performance has legitimized, encouraged, and inured us to. For example: in the pre-Trump era, I don’t recall being at big public events where mainly-male, mainly-white crowds would chant things like “String her up!” or “Trump that bitch!” But that was the background music at this year’s Republican convention in Cleveland.
This is the context for an astonishing segment from a Bill O’Reilly episode this week.
It is fair to treat Fox News as an extension of the Republican Party and the Trump campaign. It is essentially the only news outlet where Donald Trump will appear any more. Sean Hannity essentially functions as an adjunct campaign strategist, even appearing in a Trump ad; and when called on it has said “I am not a journalist.” Roger Ailes is of course the human glue connecting Trump world, the formal GOP, and the news organization he founded and ran until his recent ouster amid sexual-harassment complaints.
Thus it is also fair to think that the “Watters’ World” segment on Fox is a reflection of attitudes in greater Fox-Trump land, and again of the kinds of public discussion Trump has legitimized. Take a look before I say any more about it. It genuinely is worth watching all the way through:
The “comic” premise of the piece is essentially: China, so tricky!! Let’s go see some people with Asian faces and ask them why China so tricky?, and what they (as obvious outsiders to the “real” America) make of this confusing political spectacle, while meanwhile they are eating their perplexing food and cooking up their secret potions.
There are a million things to dislike about this approach, which you can figure out for yourself. The meanest part of the segment is around time 1:00, when Watters mocks two older immigrant-looking people for not answering his questions, when they obviously don’t speak English at all. But before and after that he gets into almost every devious-Oriental stereotype you’ve ever encountered. The only big one left out is the Yellow Peril standby of Asian hordes lusting for white women. It does, though, get into the opposite stereotype—of the exotic, giggly, and “me love you long time” young Asian beauty. See Vox for more.
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Is this so bad? Can’t I take a joke? Wow, isn’t political correctness run amok, if we can’t even do a light skit?
I really do think this is bad, in that it reprocesses several centuries’ worth of anti-Asian stereotypes for airing not in 1937 but in 2016. That may just be because I’ve spent so much of my life living in various parts of Asia and trying to understand their workings as an outsider. But I think you only have to imagine a similar “light” segment being done about blacks in South Side Chicago, or Jews in Brooklyn, to realize how gross this is, and that segments about most other minorities would never get on the air even at Fox. (“We’re here in Brooklyn, and tell me, what’s the deal with your funny hats and beards? And where do you keep all your money?”)
Assuming for now that Trump does not actually become president—even though the whole Republican establishment is still saying, He’s fine!—we won’t know for quite a while whether the mark he’s left on our culture is something transient, from which we’ll recover, or a turning point in a much nastier direction. Either way, this segment on a “news” network is a benchmark of where things stand as of October, 2016.
In this photo from 1997, people identified as "Supermodels Vendela (L), Antonio Sabato, and Kathy Ireland" at a Superbowl promo. Reuters
Today in Vanity Fair, its editor Graydon Carter, who in his Spy days with Kurt Andersen originated the idea of Donald Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian,” has a stinging essay about Trump as the modern incarnation of The Ugly American.
A central episode in this story involves the White House Correspondents Association dinner in 1993. Carter says that to its table Vanity Fair had invited, among others, Donald Trump as “novelty guest,” and Vendela Kirsebom, a Swedish woman then generally known as “Supermodel Vendela.” Over to Carter:
I sat Trump beside Vendela, thinking that she would get a kick out of him. This was not the case. After 45 minutes she came over to my table, almost in tears, and pleaded with me to move her. It seems that Trump had spent his entire time with her assaying the “tits” and legs of the other female guests and asking how they measured up to those of other women, including his wife. “He is,” she told me, in words that seemed familiar, “the most vulgar man I have ever met.”
OK, that’s part of the story. Here’s the rest, which explains something I have wondered about lo these past 23 years:
Back in 1993, TheAtlantic had not really gotten into the “inviting celebrities and oddballs” practice that has become standard for the White House Correspondents dinner. Nor have we since then! Come to us for policy discussions with your standard assistant-secretary-for-planning. And at the time I was still just gathering bile for my version of correspondents dinner delenda est about the annual spectacles in my book Breaking the News, which came out three years later.
So there I was in 1993, talking policy with someone at our table, when I turned to my right and saw—Supermodel Vendela! I knew who she was because, among other things, she had been the actual cover model for the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue three months before. And now she had appeared out of nowhere to be sitting at The Atlantic’s table!
At the time, I attributed this to the magazine’s trademark combination of serious “breaking ideas” coverage and pop-culture flair. Those Scandinavians! Even the supermodels were in-depth readers and couldn’t resist.
But now I learn that I have had Donald Trump to thank all along. In fleeing the table of “the most vulgar man I’ve ever met,” Supermodel Vendela had ended up with … me!
I don’t know whether this makes me feel better, or worse. Actually I do: worse. Until today I had thought that I had only one reason to feel grateful to Donald Trump: for his creation of The Apprentice, which allowed me to do an Atlantic piece about its Chinese knock-off version Win in China! Now it turns out I have another. I’ll never forget that evening’s conversation about Scandinavia’s lessons on improving American health care. And it never would have happened without Donald Trump.
1) This morning, as noted in installment #125, a tweet came out from @SeanSpicer, “strategist” for the Republican National Committee, celebrating the fact that the GOP was about to launch a “Willie Horton-Style Attack” on Democratic VP nominee Tim Kaine. You can see a screenshot of it in the previous installment.
2) Three hours later, as blowback began, Spicer put out the tweet you see in the screenshot above. It said that he “never” used the term Willie Horton and that the real factual-accuracy problem was of course with the media, not with him or the RNC.
3) Around the same time, Spicer deleted his original Willie Horton tweet, which then lived on among those who had taken screenshots.
Moral I: In our Modern Internet Age, it’s generally a mistake to strike a huffy “I never said...” “to be clear” “facts are not a strong suit” pose when you’re immediately subject to contrary digital evidence.
4) An alert reader pointed out to me that the contents of Spicer’s original tweet were identical to the headline in the Roll Call article Spicer was sharing with his 32,000+ Twitter followers, and that the Roll Call site can on request auto-populate a tweet with the headline and link from its item.
Thus it’s possible that rather than compose the words “Willie Horton-Style Attack” by himself, Spicer merely wanted to make sure as many people as possible saw them. Great, that’s so much better!
Moral II: If some publication is accusing your campaign of sinking to a nasty race-baiting practice so widely reviled that its originator, Lee Atwater, apologized for it on his deathbed, a shrewd “strategic” response might be: “No, of course we’d never do that.” Or “We’re hoping to heal rather than harm strained race relations in our country.” Or “Once again the press has the wrong.” Or even, “No comment.” Almost anything would make more sense than blast-sharing the story on Twitter to everyone you know.
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I know that RNC operations are separate from the Trump personal domain. Still, I can’t help thinking: as you watch strategy, organization, and execution in this campaign, it becomes easier to understand how Donald Trump could have lost a billion dollars in just one year.
Sean Spicer, the head strategist and communications director for the Republican National Committee, today on Twitter.
In the language of politics, to call a strategy a “Willie Horton-Style Attack” is to say that it’s race-baiting, vicious, and misleading. The reference is to two notorious ads, “Weekend Pass” and “Revolving Door,” used by George H.W. Bush’s Republicans in 1988 to attack his Democratic rival Michael Dukakis. You can see them and learn more details below. This isn’t something normal people would brag about.
Yet just this morning, via tweet, the “strategist” and communications director for the Republican National Committee, Sean Spicer, announces that the party is about to kick off just such an attack, on Tim Kaine! Good lord.
By definition, this kind of attack strategy has been used before, as have smear campaigns through the history of politics. But the perpetrators used to deny them. The whole point of the “dog whistle” metaphor was that only the intended part of your audience would hear the message you were trying to send. Thus the George H.W. Bush campaign could pretend that the Willie Horton ad was strictly about criminal justice; it’s just coincidence that the criminal whose face they used happened to be a rough-looking black man.
So for Spicer to come right out with a proud-seeming announcement must mean either that he has lost his mind, or that the dynamics of his campaign and party now make this seem a sensible thing to say.
Here’s a screenshot of the original Willie Horton, as seen on TV—and then, why he’s not really “Willie.”
This quote from Horton after the ad came out underscores its intention:
The fact is, my name is not “Willie.” It’s part of the myth of the case. The name irks me. It was created to play on racial stereotypes: big, ugly, dumb, violent, black—“Willie.” I resent that. They created a fictional character—who seemed believable, but who did not exist.
“Weekend Passes” was produced by a GOP PAC. Here’s the full ad:
“Revolving Door” was the handiwork of the Bush campaign itself, including advisors Lee Atwater and—wait for it— Roger Ailes. Here it is:
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Now the point: to run a “Willie Horton-style” campaign is bad enough. It’s meant to inflame racial resentments and fears. But saying you’re going to do it, and hailing that fact as an “exclusive,” travels from the realm of the reprehensible to the idiotic. It’s like an infomercial that begins, “We’re pushing a new scam!” Or like Bill Cosby showing up for a date and saying, “One sip of this drink and you’ll be out cold.”
They’re doing something nasty, and they’re doing it in the stupidest possible way.
Imagine what this team would be like in power.
Thirty-five days and a few hours until election day; only partial tax returns (1995!) released; and the likes of Paul Ryan saying, “He’s fine!”—Willie Horton announcement and all.
I'm at a high school reunion in California, and in theory away from the news, but this can't go without brief mention for the record: the NYT story saying that Donald Trump’s near-$1 billion declared tax loss in 1995 might have kept him from paying any income taxes for 18 years since then.
Back in installment #95, I mentioned that whatever was in Trump’s tax returns must by definition be more embarrassing than his refusal to release them. Otherwise, he would have done what all nominees of the post-Nixon era have done, and provided tax information. In a related item a few days later, readers speculated that what he was trying to hide was the fact that he had managed to pay no federal tax at all.
The NYT report, by David Barstow, Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, and Megan Twohey, is worth reading in full. Also see this analysis in Bronte Capital, by John Hempton, of what the report might mean. Here is an important abundance-of-caution detail in the NYT about the bona fides of its claims:
Late in her losing primary campaign against Barack Obama eight years ago, Hillary Clinton put out her “3 a.m. phone call” ad. The idea was that real presidents have to deal with crises at short notice and with very high stakes. According to the ad, then-Senator Clinton’s greater experience meant that she’d be better at making those 3 a.m. decisions than the relative-rookie Obama would be. If you supported Hillary Clinton, you found that persuasive. If you preferred Obama, as I did, you were less impressed.
What does Donald Trump do at 3 a.m.? To judge by the social-media record, he sends out tweets—and real, “from the Id” personal tweets himself, rather than higher-road ones from his staff. The usual giveaway is the “Twitter for Android” label you see on Tweetdeck and other platforms, versus “Twitter for iPhone” from his staff.
Mnemonic clue: You can’t take the id out of Android. Thus a sequence of Android tweets about “Miss Piggy,” the former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, last night.
Judge for yourself what this says about Trump’s temperament, whose excellence he mentions in most speeches and at this week’s debate. For instance, this is how it came up at the debate:
TRUMP: Well, I have much better judgment than she does. There’s no question about that. I also have a much better temperament than she has, you know?
(LAUGHTER)
I have a much better—she spent—let me tell you—she spent hundreds of millions of dollars on an advertising—you know, they get Madison Avenue into a room, they put names—oh, temperament, let’s go after—I think my strongest asset, maybe by far, is my temperament ...
What it means in operational politics is, he can’t let anything go. The controversies that are objectively most damaging to him, with the groups he most needs to reach—women, Latinos, blacks, Muslims, educated voters worrying about knowledge and judgment—are ones he himself keeps reviving from one news cycle to the next:
He couldn’t let the “Mexican judge” issue go, and he kept it in the headlines for a couple of weeks.
He couldn’t let the Captain Khan story story go, with similar effect.
He still can’t let his invented claim of prescient views on Iraq go, guaranteeing that he’ll keep getting questioned about it.
He still can’t really let birtherism go.
And manifestly he cannot let the Alicia Machado story go. This means that with 39 days until the election, and early voting already underway, he has guaranteed that a significant fraction of the remaining time will feature a story likely to irritate: Hispanic voters in general (“Miss Housekeeping”); people sensitive about their weight (“Miss Piggy”); women in general; men and women who don’t like to hear women talked about in this way; and people wondering what kind of decisions a president will be making at 3 a.m. Quite the masterful campaign strategy.
“Chessmaster, or pawn?” was for a long time a question about Obama. “Dumb, or dumber?” is the emerging question about Trump.
And I hate to say it again, but it’s still true: Republican officials from the Speaker of the House on down are still saying, He’s fine! Let’s make him Commander in Chief!
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For family reasons, I expect to spend a few days Away From Political News. Thank goodness! So the time capsules will have to take care of themselves for a while. But after this outburst, I almost feel as if additional evidence—about self-control, about views of women, about basic fitness for command—might just be piling on. We know who this man is.
Fidel Castro in 2004, a few years after Donald Trump's organization reportedly did business in his country while the U.S. embargo still applied.Claudia Daut / Reuters
Just for the record:
1) Cuba. Kurt Eichenwald today documented in Newsweek that Trump companies did business in Cuba during Fidel Castro’s regime, which according to Eichenwald’s documents was an intentional violation of the U.S. embargo on Cuba.
The embargo was a stupid and self-defeating policy. But it was the law, which Trump’s organization, by all appearances, intentionally broke. Dealing with Cuba, in those days, was a bright-line taboo. You could get in trouble for having Cuban cigars. You were breaking federal law if you spent any U.S. money there. Yet this is what (apparently) the Trump organization went ahead and did—even as Trump gave speeches to Cuban-American groups about the evils of Castro and the need to keep him isolated.
In other years, this would be big news all on its own.
2) Foundation. In the latest installment of David Fahrenthold’s extraordinary saga in the Washington Post, he has revealed that the Trump Foundation, already surrounded by numerous “self-dealing” controversies, never had legal authorization to raise funds as a charity. As the story reports:
Under the laws in New York, where the Donald J. Trump Foundation is based, any charity that solicits more than $25,000 a year from the public must obtain a special kind of registration beforehand. Charities as large as Trump’s must also submit to a rigorous annual audit that asks — among other things — whether the charity spent any money for the personal benefit of its officers.
No further annotation. This is what is on the record about the man the GOP establishment still says should be commander in chief, with 39 days to go.
USA Today came into existence early in Ronald Reagan’s first term. Since then it has covered eight presidential races: Reagan-Mondale, Bush-Dukakis, Bush-Clinton, Clinton-Dole, Gore-Bush, Bush-Kerry, Obama-McCain, and Obama-Romney.
In none of those contests, with their significant differences in politics and personalities, has its editorial board expressed a specific preference for or against a candidate. Just now, in its ninth race, it has.
In the 34-year history of USA TODAY, the Editorial Board has never taken sides in the presidential race. Instead, we’ve expressed opinions about the major issues and haven’t presumed to tell our readers, who have a variety of priorities and values, which choice is best for them….
This year, the choice isn’t between two capable major party nominees who happen to have significant ideological differences. This year, one of the candidates — Republican nominee Donald Trump — is, by unanimous consensus of the Editorial Board, unfit for the presidency.
It goes on to make the case in detail.
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As a reminder, in the “things that have not happened before” category, this follows: the Arizona Republic, endorsing a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time ever; the Dallas Morning News, doing the same thing for the first time in modern history; similarly for the Cincinnati Enquirer; similarly for major business leaders and many others. Noted for the record with just over 39 days to go, and early voting underway.
Just after Monday night’s debate, Donald Trump said that moderator Lester Holt had done “a great job. Honestly, I thought Lester did a great job.” You don’t have to take it from me. You can watch the CNN video below.
Three days later, right now as I type, Trump told a crowd in New Hampshire how rigged the debates had been and, in particular, how biased and unfair the “great” Lester Holt was: “I had to put up with the anchor and fight the anchor all the time on everything I said. What a rigged deal.”
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Is this an example of what is known in writer-land as “keyboard courage”—of Trump’s being genial to people face-to-face and then excoriating them from a safe remove? Has he forgotten what he said less than 70 hours ago? Does he think no one will remember? Does he not notice or mentally process the contradiction himself?
I have no idea. I will contend that no one like this has ever gotten this far in U.S. politics before, and by “no one like this” I mean someone who seems either entirely unaware or entirely unconcerned by the disconnect between what he says and the world of observable truth. This is what Harry Frankfurt famously called not lying but bullshit. (Update David Roberts takes a good stab at explaining the inexplicable, here.)
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Bonus note: today the once-respectable former governor, former ambassador to China, and former “moderate” presidential candidate Jon Huntsman has announced that he will vote for Trump.
Governor, really? This is the time you make that call? With Trump still stonewalling on his taxes, on the heels of the “Miss Piggy” debate, and with rock-ribbed Republican publications like the Arizona Republic and the Dallas Morning News declaring for Hillary Clinton and against Trump? The likes of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell have walled themselves in, but no one was asking you to declare. Wow.
“Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote in a famous dissent. Donald Trump begs to differ. (Wikimedia Commons)
After Donald Trump became the Republican nominee, he was asked on Fox News about his views on NATO and other American alliances. He gave his familiar “they’re freeloaders” answer:
The fact is we are protecting so many countries that are not paying for the protection. When a country isn’t paying us and these are countries in some cases in most cases that have the ability to pay, and they are not paying because nobody is asking….
We’re protecting all of these countries. They have an agreement to reimburse us and pay us and they are not doing it and if they are not going to do that. We have to seriously rethink at least those countries. It’s very unfair.
This has of course been a repeated theme in his speeches and interviews. Another example: after the Democratic convention, Trump told John Dickerson on Face the Nation, “I want these countries to pay for protection”—“these countries” being the usual range of U.S. allies.
On Monday night, in his debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump essentially acknowledged that he might not be paying any federal tax himself. Here was the remarkable passage:
CLINTON: Maybe he doesn’t want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he’s paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody’s ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn’t pay any federal income tax.
TRUMP: That makes me smart.
That makes me smart. Among the several hundred people watching the debate at the site where I saw it, there was an audible gasp at this line.
Everyone tries to minimize taxes. But not many “normal” people manage to avoid them altogether, or even contemplate doing so. Most Americans, regardless of politics, resent the rigged nature of our public systems and look for ways to corner-cut annoying obligations (“Yeah, yeah, juries are really important, but I’d just as soon not get picked”). But most still recognize some basic obligations we all bear—school taxes even if we don’t have children, paying for highways or emergency relief even in places where we don’t live—to keep the system going as a whole.
You might call this mutual burden-sharing part of Making America Great Again. You could call it “the price we pay for civilization,” if you were Oliver Wendell Holmes. Or “paying for protection,” if you were Donald Trump.
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I’m not sure Trump would recognize any tension between his own outraged demand that allies start paying their way, and his reflexive response that “it makes me smart” for him to avoid paying his own way. And I realize that his committed supporters might embrace both sentiments at the same time: Those foreigners are screwing us! And, at least one shrewd guy figured out how to keep the IRS from screwing him!
But I can imagine this staying on as a reminder of the gap between Donald Trump’s economic/civic role in society, and that of most of his supporters. It was one of several related moments in the debate—significantly, all of them coming in unprompted responses rather than the usual lines from his speeches:
After Clinton pointed out Trump’s long record of lawsuits from contractors he had not paid, or had underpaid, he said: “Maybe he didn’t do a good job and I was unsatisfied with his work.” That is, he viewed these transactions from the vantage point of the hard-to-please employer rather than the perhaps living paycheck-to-paycheck employee.
When asked by Clinton about his own start in life, he said, “My father gave me a very small loan in 1975.” No one can feel sorry for Hillary Clinton in her current economic circumstances. But she did put this “small” loan in perspective: “He started his business with $14 million, borrowed from his father, and he really believes that the more you help wealthy people, the better off we’ll be and that everything will work out from there.”
When asked about his pre-financial crash comment that he “sort of hoped” for a collapse of housing values, so he could buy up distressed properties, he said “That’s called business, by the way.” That’s a kind of business, but not necessarily the way we like to think of businesses. It’s the business ethic of Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life or Ebeneezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. It’s not the way any of the country’s really richest people, from Warren Buffett to Bill and Melinda Gates to Michael Bloomberg, would talk—or, significantly, would want to be remembered.
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Will any of this matter? Of course I don’t know. Objectively, any one of these comments seems as potentially powerful as Mitt Romney’s “47 percent.” (As Thomas Friedman put it today in the NYT, “How do we put in the Oval Office a man who boasts that he tries to pay zero federal taxes but then complains that our airports and roads are falling apart and there is not enough money for our veterans?”) This year, all bets are off.
But think of this political calculation: the people who like Trump’s style and approach are already with him. But so far there don’t seem to be enough of them to produce 270 electoral votes. To win the election, Trump needs to attract new support from groups where he currently trails—notably women, Latinos, African Americans, young voters, and highly educated voters. Will these comments and this tone broaden Trump’s appeal among these groups? That’s the question for Trump and the country, with 40 days and a few hours to go.
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Related bonus reading:
Michael Gerson, former GW Bush speechwriter, in the WaPo:
Trump’s defenders will charge his critics with elitism. The great public, it is argued, gets Trump in a way that the commenting class does not. But this claim is now fully exposed. The expectation of rationality is not elitism. Coherence is not elitism. Knowledge is not elitism. Honoring character is not elitism. And those who claim this are debasing themselves, their party and their country.
Michiko Kakutani, in a remarkable and pointed NYT review of a new Hitler biography by Volker Ullrich. Illustrative sample:
Hitler was often described as an egomaniac who “only loved himself” — a narcissist with a taste for self-dramatization and what Mr. Ullrich calls a “characteristic fondness for superlatives.” His manic speeches and penchant for taking all-or-nothing risks raised questions about his capacity for self-control, even his sanity. But Mr. Ullrich underscores Hitler’s shrewdness as a politician — with a “keen eye for the strengths and weaknesses of other people” and an ability to “instantaneously analyze and exploit situations.”
