Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Here’s Dan Pfeiffer with a super-interesting newsletter about the Biden team’s message.

[T]he concept of a “message box” … is an exercise every campaign should do at the outset. It’s a simple quadrant filled out to understand the message your campaign and your opponent’s campaign will communicate.

While a little lost to time, a message box is still the fundamental building block of a successful campaign strategy. The best campaigns run every ad, tweet, speech, and statement through this filter to ensure they advance their message and undermine their opponent’s.

For nearly a decade of running against Trump, Democrats have struggled with the lower left quadrant. We never really settled on a consistent argument about Trump. One of my maxims for politics (and life) is that the only thing worse than a wrong decision is no decision at all. That was the collective error our party made when it came to our anti-Trump message. We never picked one.

He goes into the fact that Trump is notoriously difficult to define because he’s just such an asshole (my word not his) on every level. As he says, “it’s like ordering dinner at the Cheesecake Factory with their War and Peace-sized menu. Is he a crook, a clown, a dictator, an asshole, an idiot, a racist, or a Russian sleeper agent? All of these have elements of truth, but they also conflict. Trump has unpopular policies, committed crimes, overturned Roe, tried to overthrow an election, and says and does incredibly crazy things all of the time. Connecting those in a coherent, compelling, believable way is a challenge.”

But the Biden campaign has found the way to do it and Pfeiffer thinks it’s excellent:

They settled on an essential truth that is obvious to everyone who has ever seen or heard Donald Trump — he only cares about himself.

Trump the Selfish Narcissist

Referring to the ad, one Biden adviser told the Washington Post:

It is about why he is a felon. He doesn’t care about the harm that he causes as long as he serves himself.

Pfeiffer writes:

I think it works for several reasons. First, the best messages are the true ones — and Donald Trump putting his interests first is true to all but the willfully blind. Trump is a classic grievance politician in the mold of George Wallace and Pat Buchanan. But with Trump, more often than not, the grievances are personal. The Deep State is after him; the press is unfair to him; the courtroom is too hot; etc. If elected, Trump has pledged to go on a revenge tour against the people who wronged HIM. It’s always about Trump.

Second, it connects Trump’s personal foibles with his policy agenda. Yesterday, the Biden Campaign released another ad that shows how you can use the
”Trump only cares about himself” frame to explain his economic policies.

Here’s the difference: Donald Trump is only out for himself.

I’m fighting for your family. Watch our new ad. pic.twitter.com/16wSuxt2HE

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) June 25, 2024

He’ll always choose himself. Always. The mere fact that he chose to go ahead and run for president in the midst of all these legal problems and the history of January 6th hanging over his head is a perfect example. Anyone who gave a damn about this country would have laid out rather than choosing to put the nation through all this.

Finally, I will bring this back to the message box exercise for a second. The best contrast messages are the inverse of positive messages. In other words, you want to exploit your opponent’s weakness while amplifying your strength.

Joe Biden is not perfect, but he is a decent, empathetic man more interested in helping others than himself. I saw this up close for years. Biden’s empathy — even in the face of immense personal tragedy — is his political superpower.

I totally agree. Trump’s silly “Crooked Joe” nickname and his endless attempts to paint him as a criminal mastermind are ridiculous and they don’t work. He is a nasty, mean, aggressively hostile piece of work and the contrast with Biden’s innate decency is glaring.

I think this message is good too. It encompasses all the things I loathe about the Trump so I’m sure I’m biased. His narcissism, his endless, overwhelming whining and crying about everything being rigged and unfair drives me up the wall.

Nothing matters to Trump except Trump. Some people apparently find that to be very appealing. But anyone on the fence wondering whether he should be back in the oval office tweeting his grievances all day should be reminded of just was a self-centered head case he really is.

The history of discrimination against gay people in our country — all countries, actually — is absolutely shameful. Biden took a step to rectify one of those past wrongs at long last:

Joe Biden has moved to correct a “great injustice” by pardoning thousands of US veterans convicted over six decades under a military law that banned gay sex.

The presidential proclamation, which comes during Pride month and an election year, allows LGBTQ+ service members convicted of crimes based solely on their sexual orientation to apply for a certificate of pardon that will help them receive withheld benefits.

“Today, I am righting an historic wrong by using my clemency authority to pardon many former service members who were convicted simply for being themselves,” Biden said in a statement.

“Despite their courage and great sacrifice, thousands of LGBTQ+ service members were forced out of the military because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Some of these patriotic Americans were subject to court-martial, and have carried the burden of this great injustice for decades.”

The president said the step was about “dignity” and “decency”, and ensuring the military’s culture reflects that of America.

It grants clemency to service members convicted under Uniform Code of Military Justice article 125 – which criminalised sodomy, including between consenting adults – between 1951 and 2013, when it was rewritten by Congress.

That includes victims of the 1950s “lavender scare”, a witch-hunt in which many LGBTQ+ people employed by the federal government were viewed as security risks amid fears their sexual orientation made them vulnerable to blackmail. Thousands were investigated and fired or denied employment.

On a call with reporters previewing the announcement, a senior administration official said: “If you think about the historical periods where LGBTQ+ individuals were purged from the federal government more generally, in the parallel military realm that was also occurring during the lavender scare, and so the convictions from those eras are indeed covered by this proclamation.”

Biden issued a separate proclamation last year marking the 70th anniversary of the lavender scare. It described a “shameful chapter” in the nation’s history in which 5,000 to 10,000 LGBTQ+ federal employees were investigated and interrogated, and lost their jobs “simply because of who they were and whom they loved”.

Trump pardoned all of his cronies but he didn’t do this. Of course he didn’t. His evangelical base would definitely not like it and it wouldn’t do Trump any good so why bother?

Media Matters writes “We found 144 articles focused on either or both Biden’s and Trump’s ages or mental acuities in the period studied, with 67% focused just on Biden’s age or mental acuity and only 7% on just Trump’s.”

And yes, people aren’t reading the papers much these days but that’s where social media “influencers” get their news and TV journalists take their cues. It’s not like Tik Tok stars are doing their own reporting.

One of the more unusual side stories in this presidential campaign cycle is a renewed look at Donald Trump’s pre-presidential years as a Reality TV star and it offers some new insights into how he has transformed our politics into a spectacle we couldn’t have imagined just a decade ago.. The publication of new book “Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass” by co-editor in chief of the Hollywood Reporter, Ramin Setoodeh offers a unique perspective on Trump’s post White House years and a long article in Slate by a former Apprentice producer named Bill Pruitt gives an inside look at the phoniness of reality television and how it perfectly fit Trump’s already well-developed phony persona.

It’s amazing that we are still trying to figure out what really makes this strange man tick but I think that era of his life illuminates one of the most mystifying aspects of his appeal. How is he able to convince tens of millions of people to believe him when all the evidence and facts prove otherwise? How does he successfully create an alternate reality for these people and in the process change ours as well?

Trump has always been a braggart and a bullshitter, we know that. You can watch videos from decades ago and he’s boasting and exaggerating about his wealth and success as always. He had books ghostwritten for him extolling his business acumen and he encouraged the tabloids to portray him as a wealthy playboy, the image he cultivated for decades despite being married for most of his adult life. He was a self-promoter desperate to be a celebrity.

The Trump name was pretty well-known (since he plastered it on everything in sight) and his press game was good enough that he achieved a sort of c-list level of fame. But it wasn’t until The Apprentice that he became a legitimate TV star. Suddenly he had fans all over the country who believed the character they created for the show was the real him.

Pruitt’s story tells just how fake that character really was. We all know by this time that his business success was largely due to the vast inheritance he got from his father and that most of his entrepreneurial attempts were failures. The fame he received from The Apprentice offered him the opportunity to create a celebrity brand which led to all those consumer goods like Trump steaks, ties, water, perfume etc. It was supposedly a “luxury” brand but they were marketed to his fan base of middle and working class reality show fans, the same people who became his political base.

The producers soon found that they wouldn’t be able to use Trump’s own offices to do the show because they were scruffy and run down. So they created a “board room” in one of the empty spaces in Trump Tower as well as the living quarters for the contestants while they were filming. They covered up all the racism and misogyny and never let that audience know how often he stiffed his contractors or how many of his businesses went belly-up. They created the “business genius” image of Donald Trump and somewhere along the line he learned that he could now lie with impunity because when you’re a star they let you do it (among other things.)

Sehtoodah’s book begins after Trump has left the White House and is reminiscing about his glory days as a TV star. He was down in the dumps and it seemed to perk him up to talk about his knowledge of how show business really works. Trump told him, “It’s all about one thing: ratings. If you have ratings, you can be the meanest, most horrible human being in the world.” (It reminded me of an anecdote from Dr. Anthony Fauci in his book “On Call,” when during the COVID pandemic he called Fauci into the office to brag about the ratings his crazy press conferences were getting.) That’s what it’s all about — ratings, poll numbers, Truth Social follwers. It’s all a measure of his fame and celebrity power.

According to Sehtoodah, Trump showed signs of short term memory loss, failing to recall that he’d spent several hours talking to him just a couple of month before and he talked about “dealing with Afghanistan” as if he were still president. He also said that Joan Rivers told him she voted for him even though she died two years before the election. But what’s really interesting is the extent to which reality TV stardom seems to have deeply informed his approach to politics.

Reality TV is essentially a lie. It maintains the pretense of authentic documentary filming of real life but it is actually a phony, manipulated narrative that tells the story the producers want to tell. (It’s like professional wrestling, another Trump obsession.) Trump discovered that his fame and access to media allowed him to literally create a new reality for millions of people through the simple act of manipulating the narrative with lies and repeating it over and over again. I don’t know if he even realizes what’s real and what’s not. At this point his very survival is on the line.

This week we are all on tenterhooks waiting for the presidential debate on Thursday and Trump is doing his usual promotional teases to get those all-important ratings up. He’s quite talented at that. Recall that in 2016, he staged a press conference and planted women that Bill Clinton had allegedly had affairs with in the front row of the presidential debate as a stunt to rattle Clinton and get the press buzzing. This year he’s demanding President Biden take a drug test to prove he isn’t going to be “jacked up” on something. Some of that’s just trying to psych out the opponent and playing the expectations game. But really, he’s just setting up a scenario for the press and his fan base: could Joe Biden really be on drugs? Is he senile or is he “jacked up”? Will Trump be “tough and nasty” or will he be calm and disciplined? Stay tuned.

That’s all politics is to Donald Trump — another reality show in which he is the star. It’s the only way he can understand it. Unfortunately, his massive fame and power have managed to convince almost half the country that it’s an actual reality. The rest of us are desperately clinging to facts and truth, dismayed and unnerved that so many around us are susceptible to such an obvious fraud. If only it really was a TV show that we could just turn off or change the channel. Unfortunately, it’s all too real.

3-1 —- also used it in 2016. recycle

FOUR YEARS AGO: Trump sowed the seeds of election conspiracy theories in the first presidential debate.

"This is not going to end well," says Trump on Sept. 29, 2020. pic.twitter.com/Z9GBQ7J1lR

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) June 26, 2024

We’ve reached the point in the pre-debate cycle where everyone is asking “which Donald Trump is going to show up?” When he was in the White House it was “Trump became president today…”

Plan to survive the worst

SCOTUS is down to the wire for this session (Politico):

As the Supreme Court rushes to deliver the final decisions of its current term, the justices face a pile-up of cases that are sure to shape the presidential campaign — and could upend the legal landscape in areas from abortion to air pollution to free speech on the internet.

The court is scheduled to issue opinions Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. By far the biggest pending decision is Donald Trump’s bid to be declared immune from federal criminal charges for trying to overturn the 2020 election.

Other cases still left on the court’s docket could curtail access to emergency abortions, shrink the power of federal agencies and boost conservative voices on social media.

I’m passed believing that common sense will prevail. Foreign leaders are worried too, but not so much about SCOTUS:

Days before Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration, a conservative foreign affairs analyst told me to ignore the president-elect’s tweets. They won’t represent the incoming president’s foreign policy, he insisted, dismissing my astonishment in an exchange that went viral.

That was then. This is now:

But foreign officials are now intimately familiar with the whole taking Trump “seriously versus literally” debate, and they’re preparing for the worst-case scenario. That’s because nearly a decade after he broke onto the political scene, they see a Trump more angry than before, more bent on retribution, more surrounded by sycophants, and less encumbered by traditions or political considerations that may once have held him back.

If anything, one foreign diplomat said, it’s best to expect for Trump’s words to quickly lead to drastic policy changes.

“Rhetoric has real world implications,” the diplomat said, having been granted anonymity, like others, to be candid. “It moves the Overton window of what is acceptable to propose. Once it is said, it becomes a possibility. Then people support that possibility and it becomes a demand on the politicians.”

Just not when it comes to voting rights or single-payer health care.

“I’m not a determinist when it comes to Trump. His policy is totally dependent on who he surrounds himself with and the last adviser he talks to,” said one former Trump administration official who hopes to work under him again.

These assurances do not comfort America’s closest friends, who have often been the targets of Trump’s threats.

Plus, Project 2025 means to control with whom Trump surrounds himself.

Get busy.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

Okay, panic

This isn’t politics. Or is it?

A single phrase made my head snap around during the intro to a morning economic report on the radio Tuesday. A show sponsor (I missed the name) during the intro touted its “hallucination-free AI” product.

Hallucination-free is a selling point now? You recall the unsettling encounter last year with Microsoft’s Bing chatbot written up in the New York Times:

As we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead. (We’ve posted the full transcript of the conversation here.)

Kevin Roose fretted:

These A.I. models hallucinate, and make up emotions where none really exist. But so do humans. And for a few hours Tuesday night, I felt a strange new emotion — a foreboding feeling that A.I. had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same.

Take a stress pill, Dave

Could the onset of dystopia be like the boiling frogs tale happening under our noses? A significant segment of the U.S. population is prepared to believe a demented former president when he says that, due to alleged rampant flight delays in our “failing nation,”stranded travelers, like the homeless, are erecting tent camps on the concourses.

One imagines a near-future in which friendly jingles from the marketing division of Sirius Cybernetics announce “Your Digital Pal Who’s Fun to Be With.”

Clinically depressed Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide, with his Genuine People Personality furnished by Sirius Cybernetics, turned out just a bit too genuine. Yes, hallucinatory AIs are real enough that programmers must advertise that they’ve got the bugs worked out.

Introducing the First Hallucination-Free LLM

Exclusive: Alembic debuts hallucination-free AI for enterprise data analysis and decision support

BMW showed off hallucination-free AI at CES 2024

These boasts aren’t very reassuring.

How do we know we won’t be the first up against the wall when the cyber-revolution comes? Or Project 2025? And Congress hasn’t a clue what to do about them. Members were that close to being up against the wall on Jan. 6 and have done little to prevent a recurrence.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

A bunch of Nobel prize winning economists have some thoughts on Trump’s “economic proposals”

Sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists signed a joint letter Tuesday warning of what they see as economic risks if former President Donald Trump were to serve a second term, including reheated inflation.

“While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we all agree that Joe Biden’s economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump’s,” the economists wrote. Axios was first to report the letter.

“There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets,” wrote the group of politically progressive academics.

Trump has so far proposed making his first-term tax cuts permanent, imposing universal tariffs on all imports, with a China-specific tariff rate between 60% and 100%, and pressuring the independent Federal Reserve Board to cut interest rates.

Economists and Wall Street analysts alike have predicted that any or all of those proposals could reinflate prices, which remain vulnerable despite cooling slightly in recent months.

[…]

“Nonpartisan researchers, including at Evercore, Allianz, Oxford Economics, and the Peterson Institute, predict that if Donald Trump successfully enacts his agenda, it will increase inflation,” the economists wrote.

They weighed in because they were concerned about polls which showed that mosty Americans think Trump would be better than Biden on the economy (mostly because he’s a liar…)

The Trump campaign responded with a serious riposte defending his policies:

“The American people don’t need worthless out of touch Nobel peace prize winners to tell them which president put more money in their pockets,” Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to CNBC.

She called them “worthless Nobel Peace Prize winners.” She’s almost as smart as her Dear Leader.

I guess most people “do their own research” these days so I’m sure they’ve come to their own conclusions about the possible effects of Trump’s proposals. The media might take note, however and consider this when they are writing their hundreds of pieces about how Americans are economically suffering more than any time in human history. I’m not sure they will though.

Another MAGA kook planning to hijack the US House and there’s nothng Mike Johnson can do about it. (That’s assuming he wants to.) The aptly named Ann Paulina Luna from Florida is going to force a vote to have the House sergeant at arms to take Merrick Garland into custody. Seriously:

“It is imperative that Congress uses its inherent contempt powers and instructs the Sergeant at Arms to bring Attorney General Garland to the House for questioning and compel him to produce the requested evidence,” Luna wrote to her colleagues in a letter on Monday.

“This power is not a mere formality, but a vital tool for us to carry out our legislative responsibilities. It is not enough to issue a subpoena; we must also have the power to enforce it,” she added in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO.

Inherent contempt hasn’t been used in 90 years. But whatever.

Get a load of this:

Luna’s resolution requires that Garland be brought “before the bar of the House of Representatives” to answer questions and that he be kept “in custody to await the further order of the House of Representatives.” One GOP lawmaker questioned, under the scenario, where the House would hold Garland and if there was actually a much-rumored Capitol jail.

There isn’t, to be clear. But the Capitol Police have holding facilities at their headquarters — and Luna noted in her letter they could also hold him in the Capitol building itself.

That’s right. She wants to have the Attorney general arrested and held in the Capitol to “await the further order of the House of Representatives.” Will they bring out their gallows?

It would bring the House to a complete halt (which may not be a bad thing actually.)

Experts on House process and procedure warn that an inherent contempt vote could trigger months and months of deliberations, from hashing out separation of powers authorities governing the initial arrest to a makeshift trial on the House floor. Adding in another curveball, Garland has a security detail due to his attorney general title, and it’s unclear how bringing a sitting Cabinet official into custody would play out, particularly given Biden’s assertion of executive privilege.

“Inherent contempt has been described as ‘unseemly,’ cumbersome, time-consuming, and relatively ineffective, especially for a modern Congress with a heavy legislative workload that would be interrupted by a trial at the bar,” according to a report on the process and history by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

I’m surprised Marge doesn’t want a piece of this.

Luna is indeed a lunatic. But she isn’t alone. The MAGA bubble has dozens of them convinced that they have a Trump-given right to punish anyone who doesn’t do exactly what they want them to. And then they wail like tired toddlers when anyone tries to hold them to account for anything.

Divorce of course

They’ve got so many plans:

Some prominent conservative lawmakers and commentators are advocating for ending no-fault divorce, laws that exist in all 50 US states and allow a person to end a marriage without having to prove a spouse did something wrong, like commit adultery or domestic violence.

The socially conservative, and often religious, rightwing opponents of such divorce laws are arguing that the practice deprives people – mostly men – of due process and hurt families, and by extension, society. Republican lawmakers in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Texas have discussed eliminating or increasing restrictions on no-fault marriage laws.

Defenders of the laws, which states started passing a half-century ago, see legislation and arguments to repeal them as the latest effort to restrict women’s rights – following the overturning of Roe v Wade and passage of abortion bans around the country – and say that without such protections, the country would return to an earlier era when women were often trapped in abusive marriages.

“No-fault divorce is critical to the ability, particularly the ability of women, to be able to exercise autonomy in their own relationships, in their own lives,” said Denise Lieberman, an adjunct professor at the Washington University School of Law in St Louis, who has a specialty in policies concerning gender, sexuality and sexual violence.

Before 1969, when then California Republican governor Ronald Reagan, who had been divorced, approved the country’s first no-fault divorce law, women, who are more likely to experience violence from an intimate partner, were often forced to stay in marriages. If they could not prove that their husband had been abusive or persuade him to grant a divorce, they would not be able to take any assets from the marriage or remarry, according to a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Of course they want to make sure that women are held prisoner in abusive marriages. That’s kind of at the heart of patriarchy.

When they liberalized the divorce laws there were some consequences that these throwbacks just can’t stand:

Between 1976 and 1985, states that passed the laws saw their domestic violence rates against men and women fall by about 30%; the number of women murdered by an intimate partner declined by 10%; and female suicide rates declined by 8 to 16%.

It’s not just the far right evangelical nuts either:

Conservative commentators such as Matt Walsh, Steven Crowder and lawmakers such as the Republican senator JD Vance of Ohio have argued that the laws are unfair to men and hurt society because they lead to more divorces.

The divorce rate in the United States increased significantly from 1960, when it was 9.2 per 1,000 married women, to 22.6 in 1980. But by 2022, the rate had fallen to 14.5.

On the increase in divorces, Vance said in 2021: “One of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace” is the idea that “these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy, and so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term”.

I think Vance is going to be a force in politics for a long time to come and may be the heir apparent after this election. He is a dangerous piece of work. But he isn’t alone.

This is the world that real Christian nationalism will be seeking once the libertine imbecile is off the stage. I’m not sure America really wants this but if the Project 2025, Opus Dei weirdos have their way, they aren’t going to have a choice.

Dr Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, the president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute wrote this in the NY Times this week:

Recent headlines suggest that our nation’s business leaders are embracing the presidential candidate Donald Trump. His campaign would have you believe that our nation’s top chief executives are returning to support Mr. Trump for president, touting declarations of support from some prominent financiers like Steve Schwarzman and David Sacks.

That is far from the truth. They didn’t flock to him before, and they certainly aren’t flocking to him now. Mr. Trump continues to suffer from the lowest level of corporate support in the history of the Republican Party.

I know this because I work with roughly 1,000 chief executives a year, running a school for them, which I started 35 years ago, and I speak with business leaders almost every day. Our surveys show that 60 to 70 percent of them are registered Republicans.

The reality is that the top corporate leaders working today, like many Americans, aren’t entirely comfortable with either Mr. Trump or President Biden. But they largely like — or at least can tolerate — one of them. They truly fear the other.

The money talks, as you can see by the chart above. And that’s extremely weird considering that the Republican Party has been the party of Big Business for the last century. Not anymore.

According to Sonnenfeld, business didn’t like his “populist” image in 2016 but gave him a chance. (They liked the tax cuts, of course.) But he didn’t endear himself to them otherwise:

Several chief executives resented Mr. Trump’s personal attacks on businesses through divide-and-conquer tactics, meddling and pitting competitors against each other publicly. Scores of them rushed to distance themselves from Mr. Trump’s more provocative stances, resigning en masse from his business advisory councils in 2017 after he equated antiracism activists with white supremacists. Dozens of them openly called for Mr. Trump’s impeachment in 2021 after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

They aren’t all that fond of Biden either. They don’t like antitrust enforcement and his attacks on corporate greed. On the other hand, they like the infrastructure investment and CHIPs Act and they are giddy, as one might expect, over the roaring stock market and the US’s new status as the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer.

They’re very nervous about the fact that Trump will have MAGA extremists running things in the next administration and really hate some of his new policy proposals:

Mr. Trump and his team are doubling down on some of his most anti-business instincts, including proposing draconian 10 percent tariffs on all imports; unorthodox monetary and fiscal policies, including stripping the Federal Reserve Board of its independence; possibly putting in place yield curve control to force interest rates lower; and devaluing the dollar — all of which would drive inflation much higher. These Trump positions have more in common with Karl Marx than Adam Smith.

I don’t actually think Karl Marx has anything to do with it, but setting that aside, these execs seem to be sane enough to recognize that Trump is totally inept:

As such, it was hardly surprising that just as when Mr. Trump faced a chilly reaction from hundreds of top executives when he spoke at my Yale Chief Executive summit in 2005, he appeared to face a similarly frigid reception when he spoke to the Business Roundtable this month, with no noticeable applause at any point during his “remarkably meandering” remarks, according to CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, and with Mr. Trump assuming a subdued, if not hostile, posture. Chief executives are not protectionist, isolationist or xenophobic, and they believe in investing where there is the rule of law, not the law of rulers.

These are not my people, obviously, and I don’t look up to them as paragons. But they are practical enough to see that Trump is bad for business, just as he’s bad for the country as a whole. I appreciate any signs of GOP sanity wherever I can find it these days. It’s rare.