Unmasked

Trump’s European trip last week provided another occasion for pundits to proclaim that “this is not normal.” In fact, Trump is almost completely normal for today’s Republican Party. His views of what government should be and do represent the logical endpoints of positions that various factions within the Republican Party have been promoting for many years. What is new is Trump’s bluntness, his complete lack of subtlety. To his supporters, this is seen as refreshingly honest. Even Trump’s many lies are so crudely executed that they count for his adherents as signs of authenticity. He speaks his mind, as they see it, without any premeditation, which is often offensive and frequently inaccurate, but is always a true picture of his feelings at that moment. It is this quality that won him the Republican primaries last year.

Trump’s already notorious Poland speech last week presented an undisguised contempt for American traditions. His model for governance as laid out in the speech was medieval in its depiction of a holy war between a West that includes Putin’s Russia and the Islamic world. This is where Trump’s insistence on the term “Radical Islam” leads us. In this worldview, the United States is a Christian nation with a sacred mission to take on the greatest enemy of the faith. The notion of the US as a Christian nation is one that Trump certainly did not invent. The Republican Party has been actively seeking to fan and exploit religious feeling at least since the Roe v Wade decision in 1973. The religious right was a well developed and cultivated phenomenon by the time Trump began his candidacy in 2015. Likewise, it was George W Bush, in the wake of the 2011 attack, who first exploited these views in his foreign policy decisions.

Trump is considered “not normal” too for his overt racism and xenophobia. Here too, however, he is simply saying openly what has been spoken of in code until now. This is Nixon’s southern strategy run amuck, but is not something new in Republican thought. The job of the president and the government, in this view, is to represent “real Americans”. Reagan’s welfare queens and the infamous Willie Horton ad are two of the precedents for Trump’s embrace of the ideas of people like Steve Bannon. This manifests as policy in the longstanding attempts by the Republican Party to destroy safety net programs by depicting them as handouts to people who “are not like us”, so it should come as no surprise that such attempts have become more ferocious in the current Congress. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have been working on this since long before Trump came to power, but he leaves no doubt that he will sign whatever legislation they can send him.

In the European trip, Trump reminded us of his admiration for Putin’s model of how to wield power. Russian elections are nothing more than endorsements of the prevailing ruling power. Their outcomes are entirely predictable, because they are controlled. But Trump did not invent American strategies for voter suppression. Here too we see the exploitation of something that was a Republican initiative long before Trump. By the same token, even if the Trump campaign did collude with the Russians to sabotage the election last year, both Trump and Putin were simply exploiting a media landscape that was born when Republicans succeeded in eliminating the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine in 1973. Modern technology, the internet in particular, have made it far easier to spread biased and even false information, but the removal of the requirement to present opposing viewpoints is what set us on this course.

Trump is also not the first Republican president to believe that his will should be law. In Russia, Putin is wielding power in much the same way as the Communist leaders of old. Nixon also believed that the presidency allowed him to use power however he pleased, but our system of checks and balances held him back then. Now, with the modern Republican Party in control of all branches of our government, it is not clear that Trump’s misuses of power will be checked. There have been almost no signs of any Howard Bakers, ready to challenge the authority of a president from his own party in the name of the greater good. It comes down to a view of government that should be unconstitutional, and would be if Republicans over the years had not made so many judicial appointments, particularly to the Supreme Court.

The sick irony here is that this is just the kind of governance the Founding Fathers of our nation were rebelling against. State religions were a phenomenon of European nations at the time, England in particular. The modern Tea Party stands in opposition to the ideals that prompted the actual Boston Tea Party. Those original Americans wanted elections that empowered all free men, although they lacked the foresight to include women, and they lacked the vision to abolish slavery. What they did do is deliberately create a system that would facilitate these improvements later. They wanted elections where the outcome was uncertain, where the best man could win. They tried to build in safeguards to prevent a man like Donald Trump from becoming president, or to facilitate his removal if that became necessary. Some of the most important of those safeguards were the rights of free speech, a free press, and the right to peaceably assemble and protest. The Founding Fathers knew that we needed to have a free flow of good information in order to make the best choices for the governing of our nation.

So yes, Donald Trump embraces racism, seeks absolute power, and hopes to use the religious right to further his agenda. What is new is that Trump does so so openly and bluntly. He couches nothing in polite language. Where other Republicans might be playing an elaborate chess game, Trump resorts to professional wrestling. It’s ugly, seeking to appeal to our basest impulses, but it allows him to present his battles as entertainment. He can make the Poland speech, because he has conditioned us to expect him to say outrageous things, but he hopes to blunt our outrage through repetition and sheer fatigue. The goals, and the worldview that supports them, have been part of the Republican Party for decades. Trump was simply the first one to realize that it was time to express them openly.

For my musical selection this week, I present Kate Bush contemplating the risks of deception. This one has an official music video that is a fine example of just how bad 1980s music videos could be. Trust me, it’s much better to just stare at the album cover, and let your imagination do the rest of the work:

The Victory We Need

In a previous post, I wrote about how important I believe it is to not opt out of this election, either by voting for a third party candidate or not at all. I still think that is important, but I realize that I was thinking in terms of normal strategy for a normal election. This election is not normal. Once in a generation, the Republican Party loses its way so completely that they nominate a candidate who represents a clear danger to everything the country I love stands for. The last one was Barry Goldwater in 1964. The new one is Donald Trump in 2016. If there was any doubt of that before, the release last weekend of the Access America video should put those doubts to rest.

Let me be clear. I do not believe Republican voters are evil. We have an honest philosophical difference that defines the set of solutions for the nation’s problems we think we should pursue. But Donald Trump does not represent traditional Republicans. He represents instead the completion of a takeover of the Republican Party by a group of dangerous extremists ruled by hatred and fear. This is the culmination of a lengthy process that had George W Bush making us a nation of torturers, and Mitt Romney playing to these extremists in order to secure his nomination. It goes back to coded language like “law and order” that encouraged fear of the “other” in our society. And it is the reason the sixteen other options traditional Republicans had to choose from this primary season were such an unappealing lot. It is also how the Republican Party became a Party that refuses to govern when a Democrat is president. Congress as a whole is not the reason why their approval ratings are so low; it is the fact that these extremist Republicans hold undue influence over the Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate. So Donald Trump may be the current figurehead, but it is important to understand that he is only part of the problem. His nomination did not occur in a vacuum.

So, what can we do about it? Obviously, first and foremost, Donald Trump must not become president. But a close election would normalize everything he has done. It would be easy then to say, “Well, it didn’t work this time, but next time we’ll get it right.” There must be no next time. The results of this election must be an unmistakable rejection of Donald Trump and the forces that brought him to power. We need a victory by Hillary Clinton that is so thorough that no one could possibly believe the election was rigged. We need an election with coattails that give Clinton Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate. To get there, progressives need to set aside their protest votes for another time, and insure a Clinton landslide of historic proportions. Traditional Republicans need to understand that they must throw what their party has become under the bus this year, in order to reclaim the Party in the future. We need a rejection of Republican House candidates in “safe” districts, especially but not only those who will not renounce Trump.

With luck, this will force the Republican Party establishment to realize that they must once again become a party that shares in the governance of our country. It will also allow Hillary Clinton to govern from further to the left than she will be able to if her Party does not win the Congress. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren might be able to head Senate committees. Clinton could count on getting more liberal nominees to the Supreme Court out of the Judiciary Committee than a Republican-controlled Senate would allow. And the American people, all of the American people, would be able to see for the first time in far too long what good the Government can do when given the chance to actually govern.

The Company You Keep

It is becoming apparent that Donald Trump has very little chance of being elected in November. It’s hard to call his actions missteps when his latest revamping of his campaign staff seems to indicate a belief on his part that his problems stem from too much restraint in the name of unifying the party. Perhaps it was the publication last week of two open letters from the Republican Establishment that led Mr Trump to conclude that he should stop trying to please the Establishment wing of the party if this was the thanks he would get. In this letter, Republican legislators and campaign officials appealed to Reince Priebus, head of the Republican National Committee, to stop all financial support of the Trump campaign, and instead devote all financial support to Senate and House races. The signees believe that Trump may cost the Republicans their current majorities in both the House and the Senate. By contrast, this letter from former Republican national security officials does not seek any result beyond making sure that Donald Trump does not become president. What both letters share, however, is a firm resolve to disown the Trump phenomenon, to say that voters should not judge the Party by its current nominee. So it is worth asking if voters should in fact make this linkage.

The letter to Priebus is the least credible in this respect. It is saying, “Don’t let the American people blame us for Trump”, but the Republicans in the Senate are still saying by their refusal to even hold hearings for Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland that they are holding out in the hopes that Donald Trump can be elected and name a replacement. Mitch McConnell and others stated early in the process that they wanted the American people to decide in November who should be the next Justice; that statement has backfired badly, and become an implicit endorsement of Trump. The letter from the national security experts is on firmer ground, because its signees do not hold and are not seeking office. Still, they have been promoters of the Republican brand for many years, and Donald Trump did not arise from a vacuum.

Donald Trump represents what might be called a “political breakout”. In the stock market, a stock or index can reach a certain price level several times, only to fall back again. That price is referred to as the resistance point. There is eventually a final push, and the price “breaks out”, usually hitting price levels far above the previous resistance point. This is illustrated in the chart above. A breakout does not have to measure the actual value of a stock; instead it is a measure of mass psychology, a final squashing of the doubters, however strong their arguments. The politics of fear have been practiced by the Republican Party since at least 1968, with Nixon’s appeals for law and order. In subsequent elections, various Republican standard bearers invoked welfare queens and Willie Horton in the name of faux patriotism. This in turn fueled the rise of the Tea Party, along with financing from the Koch brothers and others, and the building of a media machine that spread deliberate misinformation designed to spark anger and fear. All of this was done in the belief that the Republican Establishment, our letter writers, could control and use the forces of negativity they were cultivating. This is the year that the Establishment found out they were wrong. Trump has broken through their resistance, and he controls them.

I think the letter writers really do believe what they have written and signed their names to. They are sincerely shocked and appalled by Trump’s excesses. They genuinely fear the harm his candidacy could do to his fellow Republicans. But they created this situation over the course of many years. Trump has gathered the angry mob, but they were the ones who stoked that anger, carefully they thought, for all this time. Trump has taken all this negative energy and harnessed it. Our letter writers belatedly recognize the danger, but they have not accepted their responsibility for it yet. That will be a job for voters in November.