Quote of the year:
"what digby sez..."
Month: September 2020
In the aftermath of tragedies and disasters, the country naturally turns to the president for words of reassurance. Whether it’s a mass shooting or a terrorist attack or a hurricane — all events that happen more often than we’d like — the president is called upon to comfort those directly affected and bring the nation together to face whatever the aftermath might be.
Depending on your political bent, you might think of Ronald Reagan after the Challenger explosion saying, “We will never forget them as they ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.'” Or maybe George W. Bush standing in the rubble of the World Trade Center or speaking at the Islamic Center of Washington six days after the attacks to quote from the Quran and declare that “Islam is peace.” I think of Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” after the Charleston church massacre and Bill Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing, saying, “You have lost too much, but you have not lost everything. And you have certainly not lost America, for we will stand with you for as many tomorrows as it takes.”
This is a big part of the job that presidents are required to perform, and certainly some are better at it than others. But no president has ever been as terrible at the task as Donald Trump. He is simply incapable of being empathetic or reassuring. He doesn’t even try. Instead of trying to bring the country together in a time of almost unprecedented stress and trauma, he has decided to intensify the nation’s anxiety for his own personal and political gain. If there’s ever been a more cynical election strategy I can’t think of it.
Trump and his campaign are making no secret of the fact that they believe protests and civil unrest will make people vote for a second term and so they are stoking the discord as much as possible. They think they can finesse his administration’s disastrous response to the deadly pandemic and the resulting economic catastrophe by ginning up chaos in the streets and focusing people’s attention away from the other problems in their lives and aiming their anxiety at Black Lives Matter protesters, progressives and big cities.
Trump’s comments in interviews and press briefings have been downright puerile and weird in the last few days, passing on bizarre conspiracy theories about black-clad thugs on planes and accusing Joe Biden of being on drugs. His incoherence has undermined whatever claim he might have to be in control.
The president traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, the site of the most recent police shooting of an unarmed Black man. This time the man was Jacob Blake, shot seven times in the back just inches from his three young children. This city of 100,000 on Lake Michigan has of course also been the site of subsequent protests and violence, including the incident when a Trump follower shot three people, killing two of them, and the police let him walk right past them, with the murder weapon slung across his chest, to drive home to his mother’s house in neighboring Illinois.
Any other president would have gone there to speak to the victims and their families. Certainly you would expect him at least to meet with leaders of the Black community leaders and local elected officials to hear their issues and discuss possible federal help. But he didn’t.
Instead, Trump made excuses for vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, suggesting in a press briefing that he sympathized with Rittenhouse rather than his victims. In Kenosha, flanked by Attorney General Bill Barr and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, Trump met with law enforcement to praise their great work. He made excuses for the police officer who shot Blake seven times by saying, “They choke sometimes and it’s a very tough situation — it’s very tough, and then people call them bad and horrible.”
It’s hard to believe that no one has told Trump that using the word “choke” in this context, in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, is the poorest possible choice. He probably wouldn’t care. In his interview with Laura Ingraham the previous night, the president actually compared police officers “choking” in this way to a pro golfer missing a putt.
Trump toured of businesses that were burned during the first night of protests and promised to help them rebuild. (One proprietor refused to participate in this photo-op, so the previous owner was recruited to play along.) But the real point of the visit was the roundtable meeting with a group of white, male law enforcement officers.
Trump ostentatiously told the assembled lawmen that they could feel free to remove their masks and then announced that “Kenosha has been ravaged by anti-police and anti-American riots” and that “reckless far-left politicians continue to push the destructive message that our nation and our law enforcement are oppressive or racist — they’ll throw out any word that comes to them.” He proclaimed, “These are not acts of peaceful protests, but domestic terror.”
It’s interesting that he chose that term. We’ve learned recently that the Department of Homeland Security has tried for years to get Trump to pay attention to domestic terrorism, which he has consistently ignored. Experts in the department considered this a dangerous and growing threat — but of course the domestic terrorists they were warning him about aren’t from the far left. They are those our president considers “very fine people” — like Kyle Rittenhouse and the Charlottesville rioters and far too many others.
Trump has always been fond of right-wing vigilantes. I wrote during the 2016 campaign about his vigilante fantasies, in which he led crowds in chants of “Death Wish” (after the 1970s Charles Bronson film, the only kind of pop-culture reference he understands). And we know how much he reveres the police, going back decades:
Maybe it seems odd that Trump would be such a big supporter of law enforcement while at the same time ignoring the domestic terror threat from the far right. But from his perspective it makes sense. He believes they are on the same side against a common enemy: racial minorities, feminists, immigrants, liberals, Muslims — all the usual suspects. Unfortunately, he isn’t entirely wrong. They are more formally allied than we might realize.
This week the Brennan Center released a report on the known connections of law enforcement officers to violent racist and militant groups. Noting that the FBI has reported that white supremacists pose a “persistent threat of lethal violence” that has killed more people than any other category of domestic terrorism in the last 20 years, the report also details that the groups the FBI investigates often have “active links” to law enforcement officials. They make up a small percentage of police, to be sure, but it’s alarming they are tolerated at all.
Trump is channeling a growing threat of far-right violence and injecting it into the mainstream as he runs for re-election. He spoke of “American carnage” on the day he was inaugurated but we didn’t know at the time he was talking about his 2020 campaign strategy. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out to be one of his “promises made, promises kept.”
Basically, that’s what he said to those suburban women in his interview with Laura Ingraham:
“Let’s say for the sake of argument you have a deficit among female voters who may be in some cases, you’re too aggressive, your tone or your tweets,” she said. “What do you say to them directly about what you’ll do in a second term?”
Trump did not give the response that she seemingly wanted. “Okay. I have to be aggressive, because I’m like standing here in a sea of incompetent people, stupid people, and violent people — very violent people,” he said.
“But that’s the kind of language, stupid people, a lot of women don’t like that,” she said.
“Well, where are we? We’re in the White House I see,” he said. “See? Okay.”
In other words, “I’ll say what I want and those bitches will do as they’re told, see? Okay?”
Both Democratic and Republican conventions featured redemption stories: convicted criminals who had turned their lives around.
Donna Hylton, a Black woman sentenced to 25 years to life on kidnapping and second-degree murder charges spoke a few words from the Preamble to the Constitution in a prerecorded video during the DNC convention. Paroled after 27 years, Hylton is now a criminal justice advocate and ordained minister who earned a masters degree in prison.
The RNC convention featured Alice Johnson, sentenced to life for a first-time drug distribution offense. Donald Trump had granted her clemency in 2018 after she had served 21 years. He pardoned her a day after her speech praising him aired. Trump also granted a pardon to Jon Ponder, a convicted bank robber who founded Hope for Prisoners. Both are Black. “We live in a nation of second chances,” Ponder said.
Whether and how those second chances extend to voting depends on where one lives. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) summarizes:
Until recently, Florida never restored voting rights to felons. Those were permanently revoked by laws dating back to Reconstruction. As recently as 2016, Dexter Filkins writes at The New Yorker, “the ban disenfranchised one out of every five Black adults in the state.”
That changed in 2018 when almost 65 percent of Florida voters approved Amendment Four, removing the ban for all but the most violent offenders. “Amendment Four represented the largest act of enfranchisement since 1971, when the Twenty-sixth Amendment lowered the voting age to eighteen,” Filkins writes. But that was not the end of it:
Six months after Amendment Four passed, the Republican-dominated legislature approved a law dictating that ex-felons could vote only if they first paid all the fines, restitution, and fees imposed at their sentencing. The law may affect as many as seven hundred and seventy thousand Florida residents, about half of whom are Black. In many cases, the totals came to thousands of dollars. The burden was not just large but uncertain: state officials testified that they had no way of knowing how much money felons owe, or whether they have paid; those calculations would take six years or so to complete.
In May, a federal judge ruled the scheme a constitutionally prohibited “pay to vote” system. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals put the ruling on hold in July until it could hear the case. The Supreme Court refused to vacate the hold weeks later. “This Court’s order prevents thousands of otherwise eligible voters from participating in Florida’s primary election simply because they are poor,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan.
Filkins recounts the voter purges ordered in 2000 by Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris that may have decided the presidential contest:
They hired a company called Database Technologies, which was founded by Hank Asher, a former cocaine smuggler and a self-taught computer entrepreneur who sometimes consulted with Rudolph Giuliani on anti-terrorist ventures. Database Technologies presented Florida officials with a choice: they could run a precisely focussed search or a broader one. “The state dictated to us that they wanted to go broader,” George Bruder, a D.B.T. executive, later testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “And we did it in the fashion that they requested.”
Broader meant much, much sloppier. People with mismatched Social Security numbers and genders, dead people, infants even, plus felons from 10 other states. It meant a list of 60,000 names sent to local Boards of Elections:
In Leon County, Ion Sancho was skeptical. The list that he received enumerated nearly seven hundred suspected felons, and he doubted that his voter rolls contained so many. Looking more closely, he found that most of the names didn’t match. “We were being told to purge a voter named Johnston, even though the felon’s name was Johnson,” he told me. Fewer than forty turned out to be felons.
Computer-forensics expert David Klausner worked with the plaintiffs who sued Harris after the election. He estimated 40 percent were Black, saying, “The project was explicitly racial—as Jim Crow as you can get.”
Filkins offers much more. But now, with Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in Florida polling, the state could become make-or-break for the incumbent. Biden has more paths to victory without winning Florida. But Trump’s poor response to the COVID-19 pandemic is both dragging down his approval rating and DeSantis’s ability to deliver Florida for Trump. DeSantis has been distancing himself. People around DeSantis believe he wants to run for president in 2024, and having Trump in the White House is a disadvantage.
The virus and allegations of vote tampering along with hurdles to counting mailed ballots will plague Florida, as elsewhere. Those burdens will, as usual, fall heaviest on voters of color. The judgment of the Eleventh Circuit may come close to Florida’s October 5 registration deadline. Even if the court favors former felons, they will have to scramble to register in time. Full redemption there is still elusive.
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This piece by Jonathan Chait is disturbing:
Yesterday, President Trump retweeted a video of a man on a New York subway platform shoving and injuring a white woman. In normal times, it would have been unfathomable to determine why the president of the United States would take an interest in this case. The assault took place a year ago, and the perpetrator was arrested in short order.
But the actual source of Trump’s interest is perfectly obvious. The perpetrator was Black, and the victim white. The video was shared, and seems to have come to Trump’s attention, by an account called “I’m With Groyper.” For those unfamiliar, “Groypers” are a white-supremacist sect who criticize other far-right groups for failing to be explicitly “pro-white.”
Trump has a way of wearing down journalists by violating norms so often and so shamelessly that it ceases to be newsworthy. During the 2016 campaign, when he shared a white-supremacist image using a Jewish star to depict Hillary Clinton as being bought and controlled by the Jews, it caused enough of a controversy that Trump’s campaign was forced to insist it had somehow mistaken the image for a sheriff star.
But Trump has retweeted enough decontextualized, random videos of nonwhite people attacking white people — indeed, he shared the same 2019 subway attack clip in June — that it has lost its shock value. But it is this very banality that makes Trump’s behavior so significant. The president is in the habit of promoting a wide array of his supporters, and we all have grown accustomed to the fact that some of those supporters are, well, Nazis.
Last week, Mary Ann Mendoza was removed at the last minute from the Republican National Convention after a reporter discovered she had promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Perhaps Mendoza was confused as to why it was acceptable to promote racist theories that smear a population of recent immigrants as inherently criminal yet unacceptable to promote racist theories that target a population of early-20th-century immigrants as inherently criminal. Or maybe she failed to understand why the president is allowed to endorse Nazi propaganda but she is not.
Perhaps even more confusing is the fate of Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican nominee for Congress in Georgia, and an avid proponent of QAnon. In addition to evangelizing for the notorious conspiracy theory that is advocated publicly by ten fellow Republican congressional nominees, Taylor Greene has promoted racist and anti-Semitic videos and other social-media content.
Last week, Media Matters found that she has promoted a far-right video that “features anti-Muslim propaganda, quotes an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier saying that ‘Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation’ and, as one reporter wrote, ‘implies that Jews are at the heart of a project to destroy Europe as we know it.’” The next day, she attended Trump’s RNC acceptance speech at the White House lawn.
Chait says Trump isn’t a Nazi but he does embrace a fascist aesthetic. He wanted a military report for his inauguration saying “I want tanks and choppers. Make it look like North Korea.” And this:
Remember, he said “Dominate!, Dominate!” back in June, which really does sound better in the original German.
He continues:
But Trump’s evocation of racist tropes is not Nazism, exactly. It is better described as Nazi-adjacent. He has activated and energized open white supremacists, who for the first time in decades have been given a president who reflects their values closely enough to inspire open defense. If you peruse Nazi propaganda sites, they contain defenses of Trump on such matters like the Russia scandal, and — when excised of references to Jews — read pretty much the same as the polemics found in normal conservative publications like the Federalist, Breitbart, and so on.
Where Nazis were once treated by both parties as an unambiguous source of pure evil, now they inhabit a gray area on the fringe of the Republican coalition. His now-infamous description of “Unite the Right” Nazi protesters as “very fine people” was not a flub or a one-off. Trump would never come out and praise Hitler, but he will stoke their race-war dreams. They are marginal members of the coalition, to be handled delicately.
Of course, Chait also chastises Trump’s critics for being hysterical about these Nazis in our midst because .. well, I don’t know. This seems really bad to me, particularly since we hear from former members of the DHS that white supremacy is a growing global movement led by this faction in the USA.
But he does wonder if this will get worse in the next four years if Trump wins.
I don’t think there’s any doubt.
More than 170 countries are in talks to work together to speed vaccine development and equitably secure doses for all countries. The Trump administration said it will not join the effort, in part because the World Health Organization is involved. The decision reflects the administration’s bet that the United States will win the vaccine race, and eliminates the chance to secure doses from a pool of other promising vaccine candidates.
Personally, if the Trump administration is in charge when this US vaccine is cleared, I don’t think I’ll take it and I’m desperate for this vaccine so I can leave my house. But who could trust it under his regime?
If Americans are ever allowed into another country, I would be tempted to go to Canada or even take my chances and fly somewhere to get their vaccine before I’d take a Trump vaccine. How can we possibly trust this bunch of keystone kops and greedheads not to put out something that’s useless or causes cancer just so Trump can take credit for it and they can make a financial windfall? Remember, Trump got the FDA to grant Hydroxychloroquine an emergency use authorization before they knew if it could help and it turned out to actually be harmful in somecases. The recent plasma EUA is thesame thing. It may not hurt but they have no idea if it helps.
Would you want to take a vaccine that may not work and then return to your normal life?
It’s not as if they haven’t been doing this for the last six months. Fool me once shame on you etc, etc, etc.
I’m not usually like this. I believe in vaccines and public health and would normally place my faith in the institutions that do this for the country. But Trump has destroyed all trust in these government agencies and I’m afraid we need a change at the top at all of them and an administration dedicated to saving American lives not saving Donald Trump’s presidency before I’ll do that again.
Most Americans think the federal government is making the coronavirus pandemic worse, according to the latest installment of the Axios-Ipsos Coronavirus Index.
That’s a pretty stunning graph. But Axios, which made a big deal out of the “partisan divide,” neglected to put this into it:
Most independents (68%) also say the government is making things worse.
That means something. Indies have, traditionally, broken down on partisan lines right along with Dems and GOPers. 68%? That’s big.
Also this:
When the Axios-Ipsos index launched in late March, more than half of Americans said they trusted the federal government to look out for their best interests. This week, it’s at just 32%, and has been stuck in the low 30s for months. Americans continue to trust Joe Biden more than Donald Trump to give them accurate information about the virus, though neither breaks 50%.
Despite that lack of faith in the federal government, most Americans are optimistic that this will all be in better shape relatively soon. 57% said they’re somewhat or very hopeful that the U.S. will get the pandemic under control within the next six months, while 43% were not too hopeful or not hopeful at all.
More educated respondents — those with at least some college — were somewhat less hopeful about a quick turnaround, as were Black and Hispanic respondents.
But partisanship was, yet again, the main dividing line: 82% of Republicans and 42% of Democrats were hopeful that things would be under control in six months.
I don’t know how anyone can be optimistic. Trump has thoroughly trashed the country and it’s going to be a long grind to get it even functional again.
Brian Beutler of Crooked has a word for the press and it’s important. He recapitulates the disastrous “Hillary’s emails” coverage of 2016 and then takes up what’s happening today:
As in 2016, there is one election, between two candidates, and it remains the responsibility of journalists to help voters understand the choice they will face; also as in 2016, journalists have begun to fixate on a storyline that they perceive as a liability for the Democratic nominee. But this time around, not only does that approach serve to mislead the public about the stakes of the election, there is also literally nothing real underlying it. The Trump re-election campaign confronts journalists with the question of how to cover a candidate whose entire appeal to voters is fiction—words and actions meant to deceive people about the state of the country and the nature of the election. Rather than address that challenge, though, they have chosen so far to simply treat these deceptions as if they’re offered in good faith, helping the campaign mislead voters with potentially disastrous results.
The term “law and order” should itself be a tipoff to any journalist with passing knowledge of modern U.S. political history. Since Richard Nixon’s first campaign it’s been a coded phrase Republicans use to signal support for ruthless law-enforcement treatment of black Americans, and to characterize liberal enclaves of the country, particularly diverse hotbeds of political activism, as criminal, alien, and subversive. Trump adopted the same terminology at least in part because Nixon won that campaign, and so to inform news consumers that Trump has embraced Nixon’s rhetoric without decoding it for them couches an inherently racist appeal in facially neutral terms.
But the larger deception isn’t the euphemism itself, but rather the sheer emptiness of it in Trump’s voice—the adoption of concepts “law” and “order” that Trump not only doesn’t care about, but actively subverts. Nixon relished incitement and ultimately proved himself to be a hardened criminal, but in 1968, he was not the incumbent president, and the U.S. was experiencing a genuinely historic breakdown of civic order.
Trump not only breaks the law with impunity, he uses his official powers to fan the very disorder he claims to stand against, and his campaign and White House have admitted he does this because he thinks it’ll help him win re-election. And yet simply by asserting that his campaign message is “law and order,” often by tweeting the words “LAW AND ORDER” detached from any context, he has gamed the mainstream press into portraying it as a substantively meaningful appeal to voters rather than the obfuscatory fog it is.
Thus, the post-truth absurdity of a New York Times story headlined “Rival Themes Emerge as Race Enters Final Weeks: Covid vs. Law and Order,” which mentions as an aside, 24 paragraphs in, that Trump “enjoyed the frustration and anger he caused by violating norms” and even “ethics law” during the Republican convention, and “relished the fact that no one could do anything to stop him.” Trump’s lawlessness is notorious, and yet the notion that Trump’s campaign is about the “law” in some principled sense has become so embedded in reporting assumptions that the Associated Press can publish a whole story titled “When Trump talks law and order, some Wisconsin voters listen,” that contains not a single word about Trump’s own criminal entourage, his responsibility for inciting violence in Wisconsin, or his advisers’ confession that the incitement is part of a re-election strategy.
To faithfully bear witness to what’s happening in this campaign would require political reporters to do something genuinely novel: tell the public that one the two campaigns is built on a foundation of lies, and delights in lying. Most have chosen to simply repeat Trump’s rhetoric as if it had real merit, and thus turned the truth about the race on its head. If Trump is the “law and order” candidate, then what is Biden? If Biden isn’t the “law and order” candidate, then won’t scenes of chaos on American streets redound to Trump’s benefit? Doesn’t this obligate Biden to condemn violence he’s never promoted, and that his supporters reject?
These unspooling assumptions rolled right past the mountain of evidence that they’re completely backward—that only one candidate in the race (Joe Biden) has condemned political violence of all kinds; that the political violence we’ve seen has pitted protesters and in some cases rioters who have no association with the Biden campaign against heavily armed, Trump-inspired MAGA-hat wearing militants who have killed people; that only one candidate in the race (Donald Trump) has encouraged police brutality while supporting policies that slash funding to police departments across the country.
Still the onus fell to Biden, rather than the incumbent president, to condemn violence he bears no responsibility for. To Biden’s credit, he didn’t deliver the remarks defensively, on Trump’s terms. His Monday address in Pittsburgh, PA, sought to reset the entire public discourse on law and order so that it incorporates the basic reality that Trump, not Biden, is president, and Trump, not Biden, has encouraged violence. The speech implicitly challenged reporters not to repeat nonsense just because Trump—a man “incapable of telling us the truth”—“mouth[s] the words law and order.’”
But the challenge to the mainstream press runs deeper than rendering Trump’s law and order propaganda in honest terms. Trump’s commitment to mass deception as a campaign tactic is exclusive and total. Not one of his central appeals to voters, or his in-progress schemes to manipulate them, is rooted in truth. Not his claims about his pre-coronavirus economic record; not his handling of the economy in the wake of the pandemic, nor of the pandemic itself; not his efforts to undo the Russia investigation, or persecute its investigators; not his absentee-voting disinformation or his feigned ignorance of sabotage at the Postal Service; not his claim to being “tough on China” or to “draining the swamp” or to protecting pre-existing conditions protections.
The notion that he embodies law and order is just as topsy turvy, but news outlets have nevertheless allowed him to dictate the tenor of their coverage of civic unrest to them. If professional journalists respond to the challenge of a president campaigning on fiction by pretending, for the sake of argument, that it’s truth, then the media failures of 2020 will outstrip the media failures of 2016, which nearly destroyed the country.
The way the press covers right-wing tactics is so embedded in our political experience by now that we often can’t even see it. That’s why it’s important that people like Beutler and Eric Boehlert and Jay Rosen and other media critics get their analyses distributed. Even people who pay attention can get caught up in this and it has an effect on how the voters see the candidates.
This has been going on for far too long. And while the media has done a much better job of reporting on Trump than we might have expected it’s really only because he is so far beyond the pale that there’s really no way to present him as normal. But they never fully reckoned with what happened in 2016 and as we can see they are ready to slip right back into their old habits.
Yesterday, Trump described his 17 year old militia member fan in Kenosha this way:
You saw the same tape as I saw. He was trying to get away from them, I guess, and he fell and then they very violently attacked him. And it’s something that we’re looking at right now and it’s under investigation but, I guess, he was in very big trouble, he probably would have been killed.
Rittenhouse had just shot someone in the head. It is unclear what happened but there is no evidence so far that the victim was armed. He is even on video admitting to it on the phone. He has been charged with 1st degree murder.
Trump used to always say that the key to dealing with active shooters was to have “bullets going in the other direction” meaning someone should shoot back. This was his mantra. And he has said that he would go after a gunman, even if he were unarmed. Here’s one example:
As students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School prepare to return to lessons this week after an attack that left 17 pupils and teachers dead, the President told a meeting of the nation’s governors: “You don’t know until you test it, but I really believe I’d have run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.”
He added: “And I think most of the people in this room would have done that too, because I know most of you.
I know it’s a fools game to point out the chaos and muddle in Trump’s mind, much less hypocrisy and inconsistency. He doesn’t know what he’s said five minutes before and he doesn’t care. He just tries to get through each moment and survive.
Today, he is signaling to his followers to take matter into their own hands. And that shouldn’t surprise us either.
Here’s a piece I wrote for Salon back in 2016 that shows how his “cities are burning” mantra is one of his oldest schticks and celebrating vigilatism has long been part of his pitch to his voters. It was on the day of the New York primary which Trump was about to win:
The mad king of New York: Why the Empire State lies at the heart of Donald Trump’s sinister appeal
Trump’s win tonight in the NY primary makes all the sense in the world, and not just because it’s his home state
Today is likely to be the biggest day in Donald Trump’s short political career. All the polls have him winning the New York primary and winning it big. He’s always been a prince of the city but tonight he will be crowned the king. No matter what happens in the rest of this campaign, one suspects this will always be a high point. I can hardly wait to see what over-the-top victory pageant he cooks up for this one.
It’s not surprising that Trump would win his home state, but it’s still interesting to ponder just how it is that the Republican Party, which for several decades now has been assumed to be deeply tied to the macho myths of the South and the West, came to elevate a wealthy, pampered New Yorker to position of frontrunner for the presidential nomination. All these years we’ve assumed that such purveyors of effete, Big City values were anathema to the heartland values of Real America. Ted Cruz came right out and said it but it didn’t seem to bother all those fellows with the confederate flags on their pick-ups or even the evangelical values voters. What’s changed?
One of the modern conservative movement’s most insightful historians, Rick Perlstein, wrote about it in this piece for the Washington Spectator. He looks at the history of New York’s conservative political tradition going back to Klan marches in the 1920s and the huge pro-Hitler rallies in the late 1930s, showing that Trump’s proto-fascist undercurrents aren’t foreign to his home state. Perlstein delves into William F. Buckley’s run for mayor, the Ed Koch years, as well as Trump’s long-standing relationships with Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy’s right hand, and with Nixon’s notorious dirty trickster, Roger Stone. He describes them as “flashy, hedonistic right-wing operatives who gargle with razor blades and wear their shiny silver three-piece suits like armor.” That’s not something you see down in Texas.
Perlstein homes in on something important about Trump that illuminates this race and our current political era:
[W]e locate the formation of Donald Trump’s mature political vision of the world, in continuity with America’s racist and nativist heyday of the 1920s, and within the context of a cultural world much more familiar to us: New York in the 1970s, that raging cauldron of skyrocketing violent crime, subway trains slathered with graffiti, and a fiscal crisis so dire that even police were laid off in mass—then the laid off cops blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, deflating car tires, and yanking keys from car ignitions.
Think of Trump coming of age in the New York of the 1977 blackout, the search for the Son of Sam, and Howard Cosell barking out “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning” during game two of the World Series at Yankee stadium as a helicopter hovered over a five-alarm fire at an abandoned elementary school (40 percent of buildings in the Bronx were destroyed by the end of the 1970s, mostly via arson—often torched by landlords seeking insurance windfalls).
Think of Trump learning about the ins and outs of public life in this New York, a city of a frightened white outer-borough middle-class poised between fight or flight, in which real estate was everywhere and always a battleground, when the politics of race and crime bore all the intensity of civil war.
Perlstein goes on to discuss one of the seminal movies of the period, “Death Wish” starring Charles Bronson, about a liberal New Yorker whose wife was murdered and his daughter raped by street thugs. Unable to get justice, Bronson learns to shoot (in an Old West town!) and goes out in the streets looking for muggers so he can shoot them at point blank range. According to Perlstein’s book about the era, “The Invisible Bridge,” the movie packed in audiences all over New York in the summer of 1974. He makes this astute observation:
[T]he conservatism of avenging angels protecting white innocence in a “liberal” metropolis gone mad: this is New York City’s unique contribution to the history of conservatism in America, an ideological tradition heretofore unrecognized in the historical literature. But without it, we cannot understand the rise of Donald Trump.
Trump’s first foray into politics was his response to the Central Park Five case (which I wrote about for Salon here). He took out a full page ad in the New York Times that could have been lifted directly from “Death Wish.” Likewise, in his current campaign, he’s explicitly evoked the Charles Bronson image. As I noted in this piece from last October:
On the stump last weekend, Donald Trump entertained his followers in the wake of the massacre in Oregon with colorful fantasies of him walking down the street, pulling a gun on a would-be assailant and taking him out right there on the sidewalk. He said, “I have a license to carry in New York, can you believe that? Somebody attacks me, they’re gonna be shocked,” at which point he mimes a quick draw.
As the crowd applauds and cheers, he goes on to say “somebody attacks me, oh they’re gonna be shocked. Can you imagine? Somebody says, oh there’s Trump, he’s easy pickins…” And then he pantomimes the quick draw again. Everybody laughs. And then Trump talks about an old Charles Bronson vigilante movie and they all chanted the name “Death Wish” together.
His answer to the problem of gun violence is always that there should have been bullets “going in the other direction.”
This is the essence of Trump’s appeal. He’s a TV celebrity who promises to be the billionaire avenger who will shoot first and ask questions later. He’s tapped into that paranoid piece of the American psyche that believes civilized society cannot protect people from the dangers they believe are lurking around every corner. And as usual, these dangers all seem to coming from foreigners and racial minorities.
After today, Trump will turn to the rest of the northeast primaries and it’s expected that he’ll do well there. But he’s going to be keeping one eye on the California primary all the way until June. If he has any hope of winning on the first ballot, he has to win big there. It’s worth wondering if this avenging billionaire act will have the same potency there. There’s no reason that it won’t. After all, the other hugely popular vigilante films of the 1970s were the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry movies, which were set in San Francisco. The whole country was gripped by fear of rampant crime and corruption, even the beautiful city by the bay couldn’t escape it.
But there’s a recent example of the phenomenon in more explicit political terms in California. After 9/11, the whole country was gripped by a new level of fear. Crime in the streets was a parochial concern compared to terrorism. Indeed, it was so exotic and foreign that it seems to have felt to many people more like the alien invasion along the line of “The War of the Worlds” than any other threat in American memory.
In 2003, California came a little bit politically unhinged. The people decided that a hike in the vehicle registration fees was so heinous that it required the governor to be recalled. What ensued was a spectacle even more ridiculous than the one in which we’re currently engaged.
The election drew a number of celebrities including Ariana Huffington and former sitcom star Gary Coleman. (This is nothing new for the state that produced Ronald Reagan, of course.) But the superstar who ultimately won it was Arnold Schwarzenegger, an actor closely identified with a character more terrifying than anything the mere humans Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood had played: the Terminator. This was someone people believed was equal to the task of fighting the alien invaders. He didn’t get a chance to do that during his time in Sacramento, but he did lower those vehicle license fees. With extreme prejudice.
These two odd candidacies, more than a decade apart, show that reverberations from 9/11 are still being felt among a segment of the American public, which seems to be yearning for some kind of violent anti-hero to fight off their terrors. Trump could even be said to be a symptom of delayed reaction, a late demonstration of bravado after the fear has subsided.
Schwarzenegger endorsed John Kasich, so any hope of a Trump and Terminator tour of the Golden State seems unlikely. But we’ll soon be seeing both of them on our TVs when Arnold takes over “The Apprentice.” Trump has said that giving up the show was the hardest decision to make in deciding to run for president. (In fact, it’s unclear whether he’ll be more crushed if he loses the race or if Arnold gets higher ratings than he did).
The truth is that Schwarzenegger was better prepared for office when he ran than Trump is today but that’s not saying much. And if he hadn’t been born in Austria there’s every reason to believe that he would have beaten Trump to the nomination. Even with his Hollywood sex scandals, he would have had a much smoother ride. He could appeal to that thirst for revenge by simply saying “I’ll be back” rather than blathering on for hours about his poll numbers but more importantly, while Arnold may not be much of an actor he’s still better at acting like a leader than Donald Trump ever will be.
Perlstein noted in “Invisible Bridge” that the Charles Bronson character in “Death Wish” ended up on the cover of TIME magazine. If they remade the movie today is there any doubt that he’d be given his own reality show?
*I’ll just note that Trump’s weird anecdote about people in dark clothes making people uncomfortable on airplanes harkens back to that mid-2000s paranoia about Muslims on airplanes. Everything Trump says is about racist paranoia. Everything.
Yesterday was crazy and I suspect today is going to be even worse. Trump is even more out of control that usual. And it’s dangerous as hell:
I already posted highlights of his earlier craziness. Then he went on Ingraham.
Get a load of this total lunacy:
In case you’re wondering what he was babbling about, this would seem to be it:
And this is certainly reassuring:
These people are all nuts.
But Trump is quite seriously losing his mind. The interview with Ingraham was beyond weird. Just a few moments to illustrate: