Month: July 2016

Donald is listening


by digby

I wrote about his approach to civil liberties today for Salon:

Last June before Trump entered the presidential race, there was a major debate about renewal of the Patriot Act in the congress. Trump was asked about it on his favorite morning show, Fox and Friends and this is part of what he said:

I think security has to preside, you know, be pre-eminent. I’m looking at security. I think if anyone wants to listen to my phone calls it’s fine. They’re going to be very boring, it’s going to be a very boring conversation… I just hope the government knows what they’re doing a lot better than they did with the Obamacare website and the rest. You know in the old days you had a certain confidence in government, you don’t have that confidence anymore. 

Trump has said over and over again that he “errs on the side of security” which is his catch-all justification for banning immigration and profiling people on the basis of religion, “giving power back to the police because crime is rampant,” allowing proliferation of guns everywhere in society, torture, summary execution and a variety of other “Putinesque” policies. He calls this attitude “anti-PC” and common sense. Others call it unAmerican.

But it’s a mistake to think that Trump’s authoritarian tendencies are in reaction to current events. They are his nature. Buzzfeed reported yesterday that staff members at Trump’s upscale Florida resort, Mar-a-lago, said that Donald Trump had a personal “switchboard” in his lodgings which allowed him to eavesdrop on the staff and guests telephone calls. His campaign denies it but there are several people who confirm that he routinely listens in on phone calls. Others admit that he had the apparatus but only used it for convenience sake so he didn’t have to go through the main switchboard to call his friends who were staying at the resort.

Needless to say, that explanation is absurd. One might chalk that up to either another of The Donald’s quirks or some disgruntled staff saying things to get back at him. But it’s not the first time we’ve heard that he has a penchant for spying. Recall this passing comment from the New York Times in an article about the disarray in the Trump campaign at the end of May:

A sense of paranoia is growing among his campaign staff members, including some who have told associates they believe that their Trump Tower offices in New York may be bugged, according to three people briefed on the conversations.

At the time both then campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and senior advisor Paul Manafort were asked about this by separate news organizations and both responded less than definitively. Manafort vamped to ABC News, “I don’t know who said that. Certainly there are people probably would like to, because there’s a lot of good work going on there and we’ve been able to develop a campaign that is cohesive, that’s working together, and in a record time thanks to a great candidate who has got a vision and connected to the American people, put the campaign in a position to win the presidency.” And Lewandowski danced on the head of a pin for Chris Wallace of Fox:

“I think that’s a lot of speculation. I don’t think that’s the case at all — I think we’re very happy with the way that our offices are set up.”

The New York Times report about campaign staffers being paranoid doesn’t say specifically why they would think this, but the piece implies that they believed Trump (or someone) knew things he could only have known about by eavesdropping. Whether he spied on his guests at the resort is unknown but people who stay there in the future should probably exclusively use their cell phones just in case. And staff should hold their private discussions in the garage like Bob Woodward and Deep Throat.

This little revelation about Trump’s nosy parker proclivities would not necessarily raise alarms since employers generally do have the right to spy on their employees, although the good ones don’t do it. And spying on customers is part of the modern world if you consider the way companies track people’ buying habits to be spying. But Trump bugging his campaign office, if true, would not be standard operating procedure. And the mere fact that his staffers suspect that he has done it is a sign of something very dark going on inside that campaign.

But this should not come as a surprise. This is a man whose mentor was notorious political henchman Roy Cohn and who seems to have gotten his political inspiration from Richard Nixon. There can be no doubt that putting the US Government’s spying apparatus in his hands would lead to him using it to monitor and punish his political enemies.

And while it’s doubtful that he would go as far as this with Paul Ryan or Chuck Schumer, Trump’s attitude toward Edward Snowden makes it very clear to anyone who would blow the whistle on his bad behavior that it would not go well for them:

“I think Snowden is a terrible threat, I think he’s a terrible traitor, and you know what we used to do in the good old days when we were a strong country — you know what we used to do to traitors, right?” Trump said.

“Well, you killed them, Donald,” said fill-in host, Eric Bolling.

He’s a big fan of summary execution for anyone he personally designates a traitor. And one could easily see a President Trump deciding, like President Nixon before him, that he needed to find all his traitors and deploy whatever government tools were at his disposal to do it. He makes it clear that his beef isn’t with government power, per se. It’s that this government uses its power ineffectually, which is not the same thing at all.

Trump does not recognize constitutional limitations or civil liberties. He’s shown it repeatedly from national security issues like these, to domestic policing to his threats to “open up the libel laws” to stop the media from criticizing him. He said it most clearly in his infamous 1989 Central Park Five full page ad which said,  “CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!” That’s not actually how it works, but if Trump knows that, he almost certainly doesn’t care.

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Can you hear us now?
by Tom Sullivan

“Out of touch” is a perennial criticism of candidates from both major parties. The Brexit vote in the UK was an exercise in politicians misreading their voters. This year, however, the presence of Donald Trump and His Amazing War Chest leaves Democrats at risk of developing a false sense of security. It doesn’t help that FiveThirtyEight predictions favoring Democrats just get rosier. But as I said last September, so long as the T-party controls state legislatures and the Congress, who Democrats elect as president won’t much matter.

From where many of us sit, the presidential race is a distraction unless the Democratic candidate sends sends us lawyers, guns and money, and provides coattails for our state-level candidates. Talk of landslides just worries me that Democrats will stay home and our local candidates will suffer. If voters are going to come out in November for a contest between two candidates with high disapproval ratings, they will need a reason, something to vote for.

That’s why op-eds like Sarah Eberspacher’s in the Guardian give me pause. She cautions against the tendency on the left to write off white, male, blue collar voters like those from her rural Illinois hometown (or here on the edge of Appalachia) as racist, sexist, and uneducated:

The Democratic party – and by that, I mean the party gatekeepers with power to wield media influence, which worked out great for the Brexit vote – are writing off those hardcore racists as an overblown minority that is making more noise than they can translate into votes. But overlooking “regular Joe” moderate voters like the ones who filled my childhood could be our undoing.

My party has gotten cocky, and I fear that condescending mentality will lose us this election. Because for all of his divisive bluster, Trump has gotten one thing right time and again: small-town America is not doing great.

[…]

Where my family lives, factories are closing. Schools don’t have enough money for teachers, and all of Barack Obama’s hope and change hasn’t done much trickling down in the last eight years. And just because the moderate voters living in these areas aren’t showing up at Trump rallies or plastering your Facebook wall with tirades about Muslims doesn’t mean they’re planning to support Obama’s heir apparent come November.

That describes a lot of our voters here. Gov. Howard Dean got this. Democrats at both the state and national levels win big in the cities but too often abandon rural America. Winning there again was what the 50 state strategy was about: if you don’t show up to play, you forfeit.

Stanley Greenberg wrote this time last year about the need to reclaim rural America:

These voters, as we shall see, are open to an expansive Democratic economic agenda—to more benefits for child care and higher education, to tax hikes on the wealthy, to investment in infrastructure spending, and to economic policies that lead employers to boost salaries for middle- and working-class Americans, especially women. Yet they are only ready to listen when they think that Democrats understand their deeply held belief that politics has been corrupted and government has failed. Championing reform of government and the political process is the price of admission with these voters. These white working-class and downscale voters are acutely conscious of the growing role of big money in politics and of a government that works for the 1 percent, not them.

It is possible that their cynicism about government is grounded in a fundamental individualism and long-standing American skepticism about intrusive government. And it also may be rooted in a race-conscious aversion to government spending that they believe fosters dependency and idleness—the principal critique of today’s conservative Republicans. If that is the prevailing dynamic, no appeal, no matter how compelling, would bring increased support for government activism.

Yet the white working-class and downscale voters in our surveys do support major parts of a progressive, activist agenda, particularly when a Democratic candidate boldly attacks the role of money and special interests dominating government and aggressively promotes reforms to ensure that average citizens get both their say and their money’s worth.

It is why, Russell Berman wrote in May, “The white, working-class voters that embraced [Hillary Clinton’s] message of resilience in 2008 have deserted her for Bernie Sanders in many primaries in 2016.” But I offer this not as a knock against Hillary Clinton, but to point out an opportunity.

Forget Trump’s bigotry and all the rest. He gets a lot of mileage out of talking about trade. Democrats need to pay attention, as Thomas Frank wrote in March, rural America doesn’t give a damn about punditry on trade being noble and “free”:

To the remaining 80 or 90% of America, trade means something very different. There’s a video going around on the internet these days that shows a room full of workers at a Carrier air conditioning plant in Indiana being told by an officer of the company that the factory is being moved to Monterrey, Mexico, and that they’re all going to lose their jobs.

As I watched it, I thought of all the arguments over trade that we’ve had in this country since the early 1990s, all the sweet words from our economists about the scientifically proven benevolence of free trade, all the ways in which our newspapers mock people who say that treaties like the North American Free Trade Agreement allow companies to move jobs to Mexico.

Well, here is a video of a company moving its jobs to Mexico, courtesy of Nafta. This is what it looks like. The Carrier executive talks in that familiar and highly professional HR language about the need to “stay competitive” and “the extremely price-sensitive marketplace”. A worker shouts “Fuck you!” at the executive. The executive asks people to please be quiet so he can “share” his “information”. His information about all of them losing their jobs.

For younger voters, the concerns are similar: their prospects are slim and too many politicians focused on the concerns of finance seem out of touch with that. As I wrote yesterday, voters want an economic system that treats them fairly. They’ll come out and vote for candidates who seems authentically more interested in making that happen than in their own power. Sending that message will be key to winning down ballot this fall. Are Democrats listening?

People who live in Trump’s rickety glass house shouldn’t throw stones

by digby

So right wingers are having a lot of fun mocking President Obama and the leaders of Mexico and Canada for this awkward handshake. It’s fair enough. It does look pretty silly.

.@CanadianPM @POTUS & @EPN take a break during #NALS2016 for a quick photo-op in front of #Parliament Hill #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/ck3g5U0Tpt— CPAC (@CPAC_TV) June 29, 2016

But they shouldn’t get too cocky. The last guy who occupied the White House did this:

And then there’s this freakshow: