Where Is Donald? Veterans Day Edition

Today, Veterans Day 2018, the President of the United States stayed in the White House. He did not go to Arlington National Cemetery to lay a wreath. He did nothing to commemorate Veterans Day. The excuse was a forecast of rain. This makes no sense.

Two days ago, in France, Trump cancelled a trip to the Aisne Marne American military cemetery near Bellau Wood, about 50 miles outside Paris, with the excuse that Marine One has trouble flying in the rain. That's not a great excuse, but it's just barely plausible enough to get away with. And Trump took immediate blowback for skipping that ceremony. But Arlington is two miles from the White House, and it wasn't even raining. Rain was forecast for later. This is political malpractice, at best. Every President commemorates Veterans Day. It's easy. It costs you nothing. It looks awful if you skip it, let alone with combat troops in the field. And it's the right thing to do. (This is especially weird when Trump makes such a point of glorifying, or even fetishizing, the military.)

I don't believe this was about the rain.

The White House press corps was notified at 10 am that the President would have no more public events or movements for the day. So Trump's day ended early. Why?

Theory #1: Trump has taken ill. Trump is 72 years old. He eats poorly. His general health is probably not great. And he just flew back from Europe.

There's a long American tradition of not telling the public the full truth about the sitting President's health. Routine health problems get concealed, and sometimes major health problems that the public really might want to know about do, too. American presidents are always navigating middle or advanced age in the midst of an incredibly stressful job which takes a real physical toll on them. It's considered better for the country if we don't hear about every health setback.

So one explanation is that the septuagenarian President is feeling too physically exhausted after returning from Paris to have any public events and needs the day off the recuperate. That's not great, because it suggests the President has even less energy or stamina than I feared, but it's less consequential than the other possible theories.

Trump did tweet four times after 10 am (from 11:30 to a little before 2:30), but that's not strenuous. Maybe he could do that while taking a sick day.

Theory #2: Dealing with a Crisis. When a president of the United States suddenly and unexpectedly clears out the daily schedule, it sometimes means a crisis has arisen and the president can't spare time for anything else. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK's press secretary, Pierre Salinger, was sent out to tell the press that all events had been canceled because President Kennedy had a cold. Most recent presidents would still have found an hour to get to Arlington, lay a Veteran's Day wreath, and motorcade back, but it all depends on how serious Trump perceives the (hypothetical) emergency to be.

He could be holed up with his advisers trying to cope with a crisis of some description: maybe a military or other national-security crisis, maybe a political crisis, and maybe a legal crisis. All are possibilities for this Administration right now.

If there were suddenly some national-security emergency, the public wouldn't necessarily know about it right away. The Cuban Missile Crisis, which was kept secret for days, is an obvious example. So was the terrorist threat against LAX back in the Clinton Administration, which had Bill Clinton demanding status updates every hour but which the public didn't hear about until the plot was disrupted. So it could be that Trump has been in the Situation Room all day, getting briefed by generals.

But Trump is also facing a number of political and legal challenges, some of which overlap. His party has just lost the House, meaning subpoenas and investigations by Democrats. His appointment of Matthew Whitaker as Acting Attorney General may not take, with even some conservatives calling it unconstitutional, so the Whitaker Gambit to shut down Special Counsel Muller's investigation is looking less plausible.

And there is the Mueller investigation itself, and related investigations, which may be progressing in ways that aren't yet public. There are a number of rumors about imminent indictments, so Trump may feel the investigation getting uncomfortably close.

What was bothering another president of the United States would be a mystery, but Trump kept tweeting throughout the day, so we have a sense of what was foremost on his mind. It wasn't national security.

He begins his online day at 8 am with three tweets basically threatening to pull the US out of its military alliances, which is a hell of a way to start Veterans Day but not something you do when you're trying to deal with a pressing security problem. At 8:44 he demands an end to vote-counting in the Florida elections, basically calling vote-counting fraudulent. At 10 am the press is told his schedule for the day is over.

At 11:34 he tweets that the stock market will somehow tank if the House Democrats investigate him:

The prospect of Presidential Harassment by the Dems is causing the Stock Market big headaches!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2018

At 12:31 he tweets good wishes to the firefighters and first responders fighting the California fires, an attempt to make up for some unhelpful things he said about those fires over the last week. At 2:13 he tweets an attack on Comcast, the parent company of NBC. At 2:21 he tweets that Saudi Arabia and OPEC should not cut oil production (after Saudi Arabia announced that it would cut oil production) and that oil prices should be lower. That tweet seems especially useless, but they all read like reactions to whatever news Trump found unwelcome.

Overall, Trump seems upset and a little besieged: still upset enough by his party's election losses to try intervening in the Florida vote-count, anxious that about a stock-market downturn (as evidenced by both the stock-market tweet and the OPEC tweet), and angry at the media. The Comcast tweet may suggest that he's particularly upset at NBC or MSNBC at the moment. I read a president who's fearful about a number of developments. But my money is on the "Presidential Harassment" tweet revealing the core anxiety: the President is about to be under a lot more investigative scrutiny and he experiences that as a real threat.

Theory #3: The President Is Freaking Out

But the President may not be holding strategy meetings on his political and legal woes. He may just be melting down. Maybe he's too upset and overwrought to go out to Arlington, even briefly, and canceled his daily schedule in a giant tantrum. Or maybe his handlers are scared of what he'd say today if he were in front of the press for even a minute. He's been noticeably unraveling since the day after the election. There's a real possibility that he hasn't gotten better, but worse. He may be cracking under the political and legal strain.

I don't know what's going on. But I feel like we may eventually find out. Mark your calendars: Monday, November 12, when things got so bad that Trump couldn't celebrate Veterans Day.

cross-posted from Dagblog. All comments welcome there, not here.

The Art of No Deal

As everyone has already noticed, a president who boasts about his deal-making skills, author of The Art of the Deal, has been unable to strike a deal to keep his own government funded. Worse, he actually blew up a deal in the making, and now negotiations from the White House side seem to have all but stopped. This is because the word "deal" doesn't mean what Donald Trump thinks it means. He doesn't want a deal. He wants a "win," which he defines as the other side losing. And that makes deal-making impossible.

Now, all the blame does not fall on Trump. We have years of legislative brinksmanship and hostage-taking to thank for this, all of it pioneered by the Republicans in Congress with their government shutdowns and debt-ceiling hijinks. McConnell and Ryan bear heavy loads of blame, as do the House Freedom Caucus, who often defy their own leadership, and the so-called "Hastert Rule" which allows Republican hard-liners to keep popular bills off the House floor. And White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who is supposed to be keeping chaos at bay, seems to have actually been sowing chaos.

But Trump has also messed this up, torpedoing deals in progress. The infamous "shithole" meeting wasn't just a moment where the President singled out black-skinned immigrants as undesirable. It's also a meeting where the President unilaterally destroyed a bipartisan immigration deal that would have moved the funding bill forward. The White House has been disputing the particular foul word the President used, but not his refusal to accept African and Haitian immigrants or his sudden decision to rip up a deal that was close to being made.

If you want to know why the government shut down, that meeting is the key. The President of the United States ripped up a deal and offered nothing in its place. That's when the wheels came off.

John Kelly is also to blame for sabotaging that deal. Senators Graham and Durbin were scheduled for a meeting with the President about the deal they'd been working out, and walked into a room unexpectedly filled with anti-immigration figures who had no real reason to be there, like Tom Cotton. That only happens if the Chief of Staff permits it, or causes it.

None of this should be a surprise. Trump's business career is littered with examples of him changing deals or tearing them up after the fact. Think of the many building contractors he's stiffed, waiting until they'd done the contracted work and then not living up to his half of the contract. And think of his multiple bankruptcies, in which he borrowed vast sums of money, didn't pay it back, and then tried to renegotiate his debts so that he wouldn't have to pay in full. (Now, bankruptcies happen and we have bankruptcy laws for a reason, but the sheer number of Trump's is revealing.) This is why Trump hasn't actually put up a building in a couple of decades, as opposed to entering agreements to put his name on buildings other people create; Trump can't get the funding for his own building projects, because he's known for not sticking to his deals.

The many stories about stiffing contractors suggests that Trump doesn't see business in the both-sides-win, let's-get-to-yes way that most successful businessmen and dealmakers do. He sees business as a zero-sum, I win-you-lose proposition about dominating the other party and making them accept his terms. That is much closer to the mindset of swindlers and racketeers, ho look to extract everything they can without contributing anything to the deal. It's pretty clear that Trump sees business as about beating the other guy. But that mindset encourages people not to deal with you. In fact, it makes it irrational to deal with you. Why give concessions to someone who won't give any back?

This mindset is also clear from the way Trump talks about virtually every treaty or trade agreement the United States has, complaining that they are "terrible deals" and talking about blowing them up. He doesn't think about what America gets back from those deals. He just threatens to blow them up, hoping to extract extra concessions without giving up anything in exchange. No foreign government is actually going to do that, of course. But Trump's whole career has been about trying to get something for nothing.

Trump the deal-breaker has been on display for the last week. First he blows up the close-to-finished deal that Durbin and Graham were trying to finalize. Then, in the opposite of normal negotiating behavior, he kept demanding more and more without giving anything in return.

The way it's supposed to work when you get close to a deal is that each side trades a little bit more until they have a bargain. It's what you do when you buy a house, or a used car. And usually what you do in that situation is offer small concessions in order to get other concessions back. You do the sidewalk repairs the city inspector wants and I'll throw you some money toward closing costs. You  come up a little on price and I'll throw in the washer and dryer. What you never do is increase your demands when you're close to a deal. If we're five hundred bucks apart on price, I don't suddenly increase my ask by another thousand dollars. I don't suddenly demand that you pay my closing costs AND throw in your washer and dryer. Of course not. But Trump does.

There was a deal in process and, two days before the deadline, Trump blew it up, apparently expecting to get more. That wasn't just moving the goalposts. It was increasing the ask. The Democrats were willing to trade some things in order to keep 800,000 kids from being deported, including other immigration concessions. Then Trump said that wasn't enough, and essentially that he wanted Dem votes to avoid a shutdown without giving them anything on the Dreamers. Oddly, the Democrats were not eager to go along with a deal where they were getting less.

Trump even threatened to reduce his offer even more, tweeting his opinion that CHIP should be taken out of the bill. Fortunately, that did not happen. But it sure would not have helped. Then Trump spends ninety minutes personally negotiating with Chuck Schumer and got an offer of funding for his ridiculous border wall in exchange for not deporting the Dreamers. Then John Kelly calls Schumer to retract the offer. This is not getting to yes. This is actively, doggedly, moving toward no at every opportunity.

Now the Republicans say they refuse to negotiate about the Dreamers at all until the Dems cave on the continuing resolution. So they're saying the Democrats have to give concessions before even asking for things. Demanding the other side cave is not negotiation.

I have no idea how long this shutdown lasts. It could be over Monday afternoon. It could stretch into February. It may end in a compromise. It may end with the Democrats caving. It may end with the Republicans melting down. I really don't know, and I'd be a fool to make a prediction. But there are two real possibilities that should go into the mix.

It would not surprise me if Senate and House eventually make a deal without Trump and send it to him to sign. He isn't helping negotiations. They might hash this through without him.

It would also not surprise me if Trump increases his demands at some point, either demanding more concessions from the Democrats or taking back part of the offer already on the table. That would be a mistake, but it would be one of Trump's favorite kinds of mistake.

cross-posted from Dagblog; all comments welcome there, rather than here

How This White House Lies

Donald Trump is both one of the most gifted liars in American politics, a genius of dishonesty, and at the same time hopelessly bad at lying. His lawless firing of FBI Director Comey shows the ineptitude. Trump led with a story so weak that no one could pretend to believe it and then, within forty-eight hours had abandoned that story for one that was actually more incriminating. A White House that keeps changing its story is in crisis. A White House that changes it story to something more damaging is out of its mind.

The problem for Trump is that his approach to lying, which has been enormously effective for most of his career, is not working in this situation. The problem for Trump's press secretary and deputy press secretary, Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is not just that they are being sent out to lie, but that they are sent out to lie like Trump himself, without Trump's skill set, even in situations where Trump's approach is wrong.

There are two things that make a lie work. Some lies work because they are plausible. Others work because they are emotionally satisfying. Some lies are both, of course, but others work by being one or the other.

A plausible lie is one that seems believable from an objective standpoint. It's false, but the falsehood sounds likely: it's the kind of thing that actually does happen, it doesn't contradict any known facts, there's no real reason not to believe it. A stockbroker claims to be bringing in, say, 15% more money a year for clients than he really is; you would need to see his books to bust him on that lie, whereas if he claimed to be doubling clients' money every six months it simply wouldn't be plausible. If I pretended to be close buddies with some of the famous people I went to college with, it would take some time and effort, or some bad luck on my part, to bust me. A google search will show that I actually did graduate from the same college as those people did, in the same year, so for all you know we might once have had some deep conversation in the dining hall. The lie is plausible.

An emotionally satisfying lie, on the other hand, is one that satisfies the listener's emotional needs. It may not make them happy -- in fact, it may make them fearful or enraged -- but it hooks them. It fulfills their need to feel loved, it offers a way out of medical or financial trouble, it offers them a scapegoat for their failures, it confirms their belief that they have been persecuted. (See Michael Wolraich's Blowing Smoke for the addictive power of "feeling hard done by.") And if the listener wants or needs to believe badly enough, the lie doesn't have to be that plausible. If you really want to blame Mexican immigrants for losing your job, the fact that immigration for Mexico is actually declining does not matter a bit; you won't even take that fact on board. People on Twitter have been congratulating Trump for going to Israel when Obama did not, which is completely ridiculous. Obama did go to Israel, of course. It only takes five seconds to check. But the people the lie is aimed at don't want to check. They want to believe.

Most Washington Beltway types, the reporters and lawyers and Congressional staffers and so on who make up most of our political and chattering classes, tend to lie as plausibly as they can. If they're going to tell a falsehood, they will try to make that falsehood as probable-sounding and hard to check as they can manage. Sooner or later every White House Press Secretary has to tell a lie, large or small; when they do, they make it as plausible as they can, because they know they can't bank on their listeners' desire to believe. They're talking to an audience that wants to fact-check them, so they craft lies that can stand up to scrutiny from skeptical and dispassionate, or even hostile, observers. Washington, DC and New York City are cities of plausible liars.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is an absolute master of the emotionally satisfying lie. His genius is telling people what they want -- no, need -- to hear, and getting them to invest their emotions in the lie. And like many people with a gift for emotionally satisfying lies, he has a tendency to believe his own falsehoods, at least some of the time.

Emotionally-satisfying lies are key for people who need small groups of people to believe in them intensely. That includes con artists, cult leaders, and domestic abusers. (I am not calling the President a domestic abuser, and certainly not calling him a religious leader of any kind. I'm just talking about how he lies.) Those liars get their targets deeply keyed up, and deal with attacks on their credibility with various rationalizations and counter-attacks. They are just saying that because they're trying to drive us apart, baby. Don't listen when your mother tries to break us up. These lies don't have to make any sense; they just have to give the believers some way to keep believing. The most successful lie in history, alas, is probably the abuser's special: I only hit you because I love you. That lie works, until it stops working, because the victim cannot bear the truth that the abuser does not love them.

Most journalists and politicians, because they are plausible liars, don't understand how Trump functions at all. Those are not the lies they would tell. That is not the model they follow. Trump's lies only make sense when you understand them as aimed at people who are already in his bunker, sipping his delicious Kool-Aid. This is fake news! This is just people who hate Trump! It's core emotional appeal to believers.

Trump's big problem is that lies designed for bunker-dwellers break down under the scrutiny of the wider world. An abuser's victim may believe he hits her because he loves her; she may need to believe that he hits her because he loves her. But the District Attorney never believes that shit for a second. An abuser who brings those lies into a court of law is in for a world of (well-deserved) hurt. Implausible but emotionally-satisfying lies don't work for an audience that hasn't bought into them emotionally. A cult leader talking to people outside the bunker just sounds crazy and sad.

Emotionally-satisfying lies to a core audience have gotten Trump where he is today. But it's always, always time for plausibility when the police show up. Emotionally-satisfying lie do not help when you're under investigation. They will probably hurt you. Cops don't want to believe you. Lawyers and reporters don't want to believe you. Judges do not want to believe you. They want to hear the truth, and if you can't give them that you need a lie they can't poke holes in.

Trump needed to switch gears when the investigations began. He didn't, because he's probably not capable. He is emotionally dependent upon the same lies that his believers are.

Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders, on the other hand, have an even more intractable problem. They are forced to go out and tell the Washington press corps, the people for whom banal but plausible lies are designed, a series of Trump-like lies: emotionally satisfying to Trump, utterly implausible, and dead in the water to an audience who's not already strongly biased toward Trump. Largest inauguration crowd in history is a classic of its kind. Transparently false, but exciting for people who want to believe it. But that's a catastrophic lie to tell to the Post and the Times.

Certainly, with Trump seemingly in genuine legal jeopardy, his flacks should be sticking to the plausible fictions. But those obviously are not their orders. Instead, they are marched out with outrageously flimsy BS, like "Trump fired Comey for being unfair to Hillary," which not only fails to convince reporters but antagonizes them and makes them pay closer attention to everything you're trying to hide. Big, big mistake. And Spicer, for whom I feel the kind of pity I feel for some of the sufferers in Dante's Hell, is also forced to tell Trump-like likes without anything like Trump's talent for telling them. Spicer, really, should stick to believable bullshit. Trump's grandiose disregard for truth requires Trump's grandiosity and emotional conviction, his instinct for telling his rubes victims voters what they need to hear and his own deeply needy emotional commitment to his lies. These really are not the kind of lies you can hire a middleman to tell for you. You need to tell them yourself. But sooner or later, you will need to deal with the truth.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

DC Spy Novel Roundup: March 4 Edition

Do you ever feel like John Le Carre's writing a novel called "American Politics?" Because U.S. politics are looking seriously Le-Carre-ified right now. Let's try to catch up on the story so far, leading up to the President's Saturday-morning tweetstorm accusing Obama of illegally wiretapping Trump Tower. (Boy, does Jared Kushner have a surprise coming when he gets back on line tonight.) Okay, let's walk through the last few weeks of front-page counterespionage. 

1) Michael Flynn ousted as Nation Security Adviser after lying about meetings with Russian ambassador.

What's interesting about this is the way Flynn got caught in the lie. He got on the phone with the Russian ambassador, multiple times, and started talking about Russia sanctions. Why Flynn, who used to head the Defense Intelligence Agency, did not stop to think that US intelligence routinely records all of the Russian ambassador's calls is a mystery. I mean, of course they do.

The Russian ambassador to the United States is presumably involved in espionage against the United States, and American intelligence would be negligent not to presume that. So if American intelligence were not watching and listening to the Russian ambassador (just as Russian intelligence surveills our ambassador to Russia) it would be a dereliction of duty.

What interested me at the time, if Flynn was acting on Trump's orders, was how Trump would replace that line of communication to Russia.  Flynn got caught not because he was being watched, but because Kislyak was. The FBI caught the message boy because they were watching the mailbox. So anyone else Trump sent would also just get caught immediately. I did not realize that POTUS already had another problem:

2. Jeff Sessions gets caught lying about meeting Russian ambassador. Then Jared Kushner also turns out to have met with Flynn and Kislyak.

It turned out, of course, that more of Trump's inner circle had already met with Kislyak. And so when Flynn was burned, those people also had to know they were burned, for the same reason. US intelligence always watches the Russian ambassador. If he takes steps to avoid observation, they only get more interested. So US intelligence had seen everyone else from the Trump camp who'd met with the ambassador.

Jeff Sessions knew that American intelligence knew he'd met with Kislyak. And he knew he'd lied to Congress about those meetings. But he did not come clean. He waited for the story to hit the newspapers. Jared Kushner did basically the same thing. The not-coming-clean-when-you-know-they-have-you is interesting, and not fully explained yet.

What is clearer to me is why POTUS was so angry about "leaks" and so eager to denounce them around this time. He knew, by this point, that US intelligence had at least some information on his inner circle that it hadn't released yet. He wasn't worrying about what investigators might find out, or not just about that. He was worried about information that investigators already knew, but had not released yet.

3. How about that Jeff Sessions lie?

The strangest thing about Jeff Sessions's, errr, inaccurate testimony is, as others have mentioned, that he volunteered a dishonest response to a question he had not been asked. Al Franken asked what he would do if it turned out Trump campaign people had met with the Russian government, Sessions volunteered that he was part of the Trump campaign and had not met with anyone from the Russian government. No one had asked about him, actually.

What Sessions did is the equivalent of being asked, "If we make you sheriff, what will you do about the stalled investigation into Laura Palmer's murder?" and answering, "I want to make clear that I was absolutely not with Laura Palmer on the night she died." Not what you were asked, but potentially pretty illuminating, especially if proven inaccurate.

I can't explain Sessions's weird error and maybe no one, including Sessions, can. But one hypothetical way to read it is as a tell: Sessions may have been so anxious to fend off certain lines of questioning that he jumped to parry an attack that hadn't been made. It's strange.

4. Trump apparently gets angry over Sessions's recusal

Sessions recusing himself from any election-related investigation is obviously the absolute minimum concession required to call off the hounds, which even Republicans were calling for, and it's not clear that it will be enough. But it evidently, it was too much for Trump, who had publicly said that Sessions need not recuse himself a few hours before it happened, and who allegedly lost his temper at his own White House counsel yesterday over Sessions's decision.

This is really odd, because after the met-with-Kislyak shoe dropped, Sessions's recusal was basically the only play. Keeping him officially in charge of an investigation where he was now implicated would have brought worlds of hurt. That Trump has not grasped this suggests that he either has absolutely no sense of strategy or tactics here or that he feels that he's in serious jeopardy himself. It could be both. It's hard to tell.

That brings us to this morning, before breakfast:

5. President Trump tweets accusations that President Obama illegally wiretapped Trump Tower.

So much going on here. First of all, this play carries two major risks. One, it risks making the President of the United States look crazy and paranoid if it turns out no such wiretap existed. (That may sound like we've hit the proving-a-negative problem, but if there is no wiretap, there are actual people who do know that. They are called the FBI and the NSA.)

Second, and worse, it calls attention to the possibility that there may actually have been a legal "wiretap" approved by a FISA court based on real probable cause. That is basically the first thing Twitter thought of this morning, on the assumption that the President of the United States knew what he was talking about when he mentioned a wiretap. And Trump does not need people thinking about the kind of evidence that would convince a FISA judge, appointed by Chief Justice Roberts, that there was probable cause to treat Trump Tower as a threat to national security. Wow. Why would you bring that up, ever?

Now it turns out that the President did not learn about this alleged wiretap from sources inside the federal government, who report to him and actually know whether or not this happened, but from a highly speculative Breitbart News story. And here I'd like to pause to marvel at President Trump's relationship to the news media. Not his attacks on it, which is another story. What's odd is his attempt to use the news media as a source of news when he actually has better access to information than journalists do. The President of the United States doesn't watch CNN to find out what the FBI has been doing. He can just ask the FBI. Other Presidents watch the news to see how the coverage is being slanted, and to gauge exactly what reporters have or haven't learned. But on most things, the President is in the position of knowing more about the subject being covered than the reporters do. Taylor Swift doesn't read the tabloids to find out who she's dating. She knows. That a sitting president would look to a speculative Breitbart story as a source of information about secret government surveillance programs is very strange.

Now, the strategy here may simply be to go on the offensive. If Trump has accepted that the Russia story is going to keep coming, he may have decided that his best or only play is to try to turn the accusations around so that the investigation into his behavior itself is somehow the criminal act. That isn't going to persuade anyone in the corridors of DC power, but it gives his faithful a storyline to grab on to and maybe muddies the water for a bunch of low-information swing voters.

But Trump's decision also does something odd to any investigations into his Russia ties. Those investigations are mostly about pressuring smaller fish and flipping them into cooperating witnesses. And here's the weird part. There may never have been a wiretap. Maybe no FISA warrant was ever approved. Maybe, if one was approved, it had nothing to do with phones. (It may have been a warrant for information on ... wait for it ... an internet server in Trump Tower that communicated with two servers at a Russian bank.)

But even if there was no tap on the Trump Tower phones, Donald Trump just told everyone who might be questioned in the investigation that there WAS. If you get questioned by the FBI next week about the Trump/Russia thing, Trump just basically told you that the FBI already has you on tape. The feds don't even have to bluff anymore. Potential witnesses will come in the door pre-bluffed. I can't imagine that this is going to work out well for Trump.

But then, none of this is working out well for any of us.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Outsourcing Political Violence: Trump and Daesh

There are still three months to go and we've already gotten to the smirking-death-threats portion of our general election. I can't even say that I'm surprised Trump did it. I just never expected it so early, and I'm sickened by the thought of how much lower the man will sink by November 8. It will get even worse. I mean, of course it will. There's no doubt. But I'm not looking forward to it.

If you have any doubts, or buy any spin, about whether or not Trump intended to threaten Clinton, stop listening tot he clip itself and listen to what he's said since. His campaign's apology isn't just a lie, but an aggressively transparent lie. It is an eff-you lie, designed to show contempt for the person being lied and challenge them to dispute the naked falsehood. (Eff-you lies re a key part of Trump's campaign M.O.)  And more important is what he hasn't said. At no point has he said explicitly, or even had his surrogates say, "We do not want any harm to come to Secretary Clinton." Trump hasn't said that because he doesn't want his followers to hear him saying that. Is it just his personality disorder, keeping him from ever apologizing or admitting a mistake? Is it fear of turning off his hard-core followers who are excited by the death threats? Does it even matter?

So we've reached the perennial question of Campaign 2016: Is It Fascism Yet? Today's answer is: close (all too close), but not quite.

I don't believe that Trump actually planned to threaten Clinton before the moment that he did it. Trump, as you may have noticed, does not think ahead. I think he improvised the threat in response to crowd mood, which is what Trump does at his rallies: feels out his crowd and gives them what they want. The problem, then, is that we now have a sizable number of our fellow Americans who want to go to a campaign rally and hear one candidate for President call for the other candidate's blood. That is a bad, bad thing, and threatens to be a problem long after Trump himself is gone. Trump himself is bad. But the audience Trump has attracted is worse, and might someday be harnessed by a demagogue more directly dangerous than Trump.

Trump has clearly identified, and responded to, a troubling appetite for political violence. What he hasn't done, and doesn't have the skills to do, is to actually organize political violence. I'd like to think he wouldn't have the stomach for that. I'm confident that he doesn't have the organizational ability. Trump isn't going to turn his most blood-thirsty followers into a cadre of brownshirts because, really. Trump can't even open a damned field office. Trump rallies are a ripe recruiting ground for potential thugs, but Trumps campaign can't even turn those rallies into a decent voter-contact list.

Instead, Trump is outsourcing the threat of violence: floating the threat out there in a nominally deniable way and seeing if anyone takes him up on it. Trump  has not thought through what would happen if some Travis Bickle out there took him at his word. or the horrible blowback he would suffer if, God forbid, someone actually took a shot at Clinton; Trump has not thought, in the normal sense of that word, at all. But he's played the same game before, in the primaries, when he muttered about "riots in the streets" if he were denied the nomination. And there the threat was clearly made in his direct political interests, suggesting to the Republican Party that people might use violence on Trump's behalf. This is a card Trump plays. He doesn't orchestrate violence, but uses code words that might lead someone else to become violent for him.

This strategy is very much like Trump's post-bankruptcy approach to real estate. Trump no longer puts up big buildings. He doesn't have the money or the credit with major lenders to do that. Instead, he attaches his name and brand to buildings other people finance and build. In the same way, he seems open to lending his name and brand to political violence that he, himself, does not have the ability to pull off. He can't afford his own stormtroopers, so he's exploring options for outsourcing.

What Trump has done also, alarmingly, echoes the even uglier strategy of Islamist terrorists like al-Qaeda and Daesh (the group often called "ISIS." I prefer the name Daesh, because they hate it.) Now, I am NOT comparing anything Trump has done to the scale or direct culpability of a group like Daesh. But those groups also outsource a lot of their violence. They cannot actually do nearly as much harm as they would like, so they spread their brand on social media and hope some poor, demented Travis Bickle type decides to declare allegiance to them before his grotesque murder-suicide. This makes the suicidal Travis Bickle feel connected to something bigger than his sad, failed self, and makes Daesh/ISIS/al-Qaeda appear capable of more violence, with a longer reach, than they can actually make happen on their own dime. In this way, terrorism and political violence in the 21st century is weirdly mimicking corporate behavior, reducing their own direct capabilities and outsourcing core activities through branding arrangements. If this is the future, I hate it.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

RNC Cleveland: Local Grievance Edition

Trump and his circus have left town, and so have I. But before I turn myself over entirely to watching the DNC on GMT, let me point out a few local Cleveland issues that bothered me about this convention. I've already blogged about the big stuff. Let me just get some Cleveland things off my chest.

1) As someone who used to live in downtown Cleveland (at least for most of the week) I felt a special sympathy for the immigrants and first-generation Americans who live and work downtown in the convention zone. Back when I lived on East 12th Street, I did all my local grocery shopping from a little store run by Arab immigrants. For a party that talks endlessly about small business owners, the Republicans talk a lot of smack about the hard-working immigrants who own many of those small businesses.

I found myself thinking a lot about the family that runs that grocery, and what it must be like to have the neighborhood around your family store be taken over by America's Number One immigrant hater and Muslim basher. Sorry, guys. I am really, really sorry.

2) Well-known former actor Scott Baio used some of his ridiculous prime-time slot to misuse Langston Hughes. This is standard practice among conservatives, who find "Let America Be America Again" too tempting a phrase to resist (although they can easily resist actually reading Langston Hughes's poem, which means the opposite of what they think it means. Generally, they seem pretty good at not reading things.).

But even if this has become standard operating procedure, it takes a special amount of ignorance to misuse Langston Hughes's words in Cleveland. Langston Hughes is from Cleveland, Chachi. There are places named for him inside the convention "event zone." Do a little research before you open your mouth, and have some respect.

Also, for those of you keeping score at home, Baio kicked off the Republicans' Monday-night theme of "taking language from black folks without giving them credit."

Hughes's poem is a little masterpiece, at once embracing the best version of the American Dream, the dream of freedom and equality, while acknowledging that "America was never America to me." Or, out another way, Hughes points out that that vision of America has never been completely real, but that it can and should and must be. Here's a little taste:

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe. 

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

If you like that, just wait until Hughes really gets going:

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.  

You can read the whole thing here. If this sounds to you like exactly the opposite of the hateful Republican convention and the hateful demagogue it nominated with a "false patriotic wreath," you're exactly right. It is the opposite of that.

On a related topic: Shut up, Chachi.

3. In the middle of all the disorganized hate-mongering, Unindicted Co-conspirator Chris Christie revealed that Trump the First would, if elected, purge the civil service of Obama appointees.  Not just get rid of Obama's political appointees whose terms automatically end when parties change power, but any career civil servants, the non-political types who are there to do their jobs no matter who the President is. What Trump and Christie want is the power to fire the entire civil service, everyone with a government job, and potentially replace them all with political appointees.

We used to do it that actually, and it is no way to run a serious country. It rewards partisanship over competence. (Imagine a system in which every election leads to someone replacing your mailman, and where the mailman doesn't actually have to do his mailman job as long as he does his real job as a political activist. Sound like fun? It wasn't.) This is outrageous just on the level of basic good governance and, you know, wanting to actually operate like America.

But here's what really hacks me off: it was Republicans who changed that corrupt system, Republicans who created our professional, non-partisan civil service, and for that to happen a Republican President of the United States had to die.

He was President James Garfield. He was murdered by a lunatic assassin who was enraged at civil service reform. He was from Cleveland. He is buried in Cleveland. His tomb is about six miles or so from the convention floor.

So let me say that it is particularly grotesque that these alleged Republicans demand a return to the old corrupt "spoils system," in the city where the man who gave his life to end that corruption has his tomb. Chris Christie wants to turn basic civic services into crass political tools? Huh, funny. No one is surprised. That's what he's already in trouble for doing.

But if Chris Christie wants to badmouth that particular Republican achievement, all I can tell him is: "Meet me at the Garfield Monument and say that again."

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

How Donald Is Screwing Up His Convention

I've had enough of the Republican Convention. I'm getting out of Cleveland today and flying to London. So I won't see Trump's speech in real time. I'll just get the replays tomorrow, and spend the next two weeks reassuring frightened Brits that the end of the world is not approaching. (Someone, please, reassure me.)

But it's already clear that the RNC has not gone well for Trump, and even the best speech tonight will, at best, make up part of the ground he's lost. It's been one problem after another, so much so that some aides getting in a car accident on the first day counts as one of the good points. So instead of getting bogged down in the details, let me leave town with four big take-aways from three troubled days:

1. Trump is not the party boss. People are chattering about Ted Cruz not endorsing Trump. But why would anyone expect Ted Cruz to endorse Trump? Cruz never said that he would. The convention started with Cruz's #1 wing man Mike Lee trying to start a floor revolt over the convention rules. But this isn't about Cruz. Trump has not made peace with any of the other major players in the party, and he has no control over them.

Before the convention even started on Monday, Trump's surrogates were attacking prominent Republican office-holders wo had not come to heel. Campaign manager Paul Manafort was berating Ohio Governor John Kasich for boycotting the convention, and getting booed for it by the local crowd. (Pro tip: if Ohio Republicans didn't like Kasich, he wouldn't be Republican Governor of Ohio. QED.)  Meanwhile Gingrich was sent out to call the Bush family "childish." That's right. "Childish," coming from the Trump camp, about George H. W. Bush.

These attacks have been a spectacular failure in bringing anyone to heel. Kasich has defiantly avoided the convention and paid the Trumpies back by leaking, on the day Mike Pence accepted the Veep nomination, the news that Kasich had been Trump's first choice for VP and outright refused. So bullying Kasich has just paid off in spades. And what on Earth does Trump think antagonizing the other Republicans will get him? He needs help from these people to turn out the vote, especially since they have GOTV organizations and Trump does not.

Trump has no control over the Republican Party. The Republican Party is currently without a political boss, because Trump hasn't managed to assume that job. He should have made peace with all the rival chieftains in the months before the convention, and come into Cleveland with a show of party unity. Instead, he's operating like a factional leader.

One of the great rules of politics is to take care of business before the meeting. You should not go into the meeting with things unsettled. Yes, I know, there are meetings where things get hashed out, but those are private meetings. Trump should have been having those private hash-it-out meetings for the last three or four months, so that the big public meeting could follow a smooth script. Apparently, Trump was unwilling or unable to make any deals.

More to the point, it's become obvious that the other party players are not afraid of Trump. They can defy him, because they do not fear him. He has no way to punish them, unless he actually becomes President. The level of open defiance from Kasich, Cruz, and several others makes it clear that they are not in the least worried that Trump will be elected. You don't do this to a member of your party who might be President in six months. Cruz and Kasich aren't just betting that Trump will lose. They are completely confident that he will lose.

2. It's personal, not business. Melania Trump's pointless, self-inflicted plagiarism incident is just the most vivid illustration of how Trump World rolls, ignoring the professionals in favor of family members and family retainers. It's not simply that the Trump campaign has not professionalized, which it has not. It's that the inner circle actively vetoes and undermines the attempts at professionalization. The Trump family runs like the Corleone Family would if everyone had to listen to Fredo.

There are some professionals around, but their professional judgment is ignored and they are told instead to enable the amateur insiders' decisions.  That misunderstands what professionals are for. They are not there to tell you what you want. They are there to provide expertise that you need and don't have. When a medical doctor gives you his professional advice, you should take it. When a rich client starts telling the doctor that the doctor is paid to do what the patient says, well, that's a rich client who is going to OD on something.

Two professional speechwriters, who had done this before and done it well, wrote a script. Melania, who has no experience with anything like this task, threw out that speech. She then rewrote it with a Trump family retainer who has done some writing but was not at all prepared for a high-stakes task like a major convention speech. So you had a family retainer who wasn't fully qualified operating at the direction, and following the instructions, of a family member who was thoroughly unqualified. Surprisingly, the result was not good.

Then Paul Manafort, one of the allegedly grown-up professionals, was forced to go out and do what the Trumps wanted, which was to flatly and obviously lie for two days, insulting his own intelligence with every word. On the same morning that Manafort had to sit and be called a liar to his face on CNN, the Trumps changed tack and had the family retainer admit to exactly the things Manafort had just denied. The professionals, again, got thrown under the bus.

Professionals only help you if you take your advice. Trump hires professionals to enable his own bad instincts. There is no reason to believe this problem will go away.

3. Trump is still running a primary campaign. It has been shocking how much the Trump convention has been about throwing red meat to the base. Even leaving aside the shocking calls to jail and even kill Hillary Clinton, in a complete break with America's civil politics, the whole show so far has been about riling up the base rather than reaching out to swing voters.

If you didn't know what Benghazi was, or why the Republicans blame Hillary for it, before Monday night, you still wouldn't know after watching this convention. And that's after a solid forty-five minute block of Benghazi programming on Monday. That material wasn't just pitched to the base's biases. It was pitched to people who had already absorbed the fairly complicated conspiracy narrative, which it never really bothered to explain. Even the hate-monging is only for the initiated.

I mean, yes, conventions are meant to get the activists excited, so they will go out and work hard for the campaign. But they are even more important as outreach to the wider electorate. Trump cannot win with just the base of voters who want to imprison Hillary. And what I'm seeing and hearing is a convention that's splitting and alienating even the Republican activists.

I'm not saying he's turning off swing voters. I'm saying he's not even trying to reach them.

4. Losing control of the narrative.  Trump needed this convention to change the press's conversation about him, and to dispel the conventional wisdom that he is a disorganized crazy person who's running his campaign into the ground. And the press would be willing, even eager, to go along with that "New Trump" narrative if Trump game them some slight and superficial grounds to go along with it. He doesn't really need to convince the media that he isn't crazy. He just needs to give them something they can use to pretend he isn't. Instead, Trump has gone out of his way to cement the crazy screw-up story. He has done this by 1) being crazy and 2) screwing up.

But it's worse than that. Trump has gotten as far as he has by bullying the media, by rolling them, and by counting on their laziness. When he's called on things, he's turned it around into an attack on the press, and then moved on to the next crazy. Those tricks are beginning to stop working now. They're not effective as they used to be, and sometimes they're counter-productive. The stakes are too high, the stage is too big, and the media have already been lied to so baldly that they're out of free passes to give. At this point, Trump is putting the media in the position of embarrassing him or embarrassing themselves, as he tries to force them to accept his Humpty-Dumpty lies in front of millions of people. They should have stopped accepting his lies a year ago. But he's pushed it to the point where they can't afford to accept his lies even if they wanted to.

Trump's basic communication strategy is signal jamming. He doesn't make a strong case for himself, He just creates so much noise, in the radio-engineer sense of "noise" as static, that no one else can get their message out clearly. That's what happened to the other 16 palookas in the primary. They couldn't make their cases to the public because Trump drowned them out with his endless static.

Hillary Clinton isn't the catchiest tunesmith, but she is a very experienced communicator and she has an enormous broadcast apparatus to send out her message. I expect Trump to spend most of his energies, especially during the Democratic convention, on creating distractions to try to dull Hillary's message. It may or may not work, depending on how the media play along. But what I do know, now, after a year of this nonsense, is that Trump has very little positive signal of his own to broadcast. He can't even get his own children to tell heart-warming anecdotes about him, suggesting that there really may be no heartwarming anecdotes about him. (Compare Melania's speech to the Michelle Obama speech she ripped off; what's missing are all the detailed personal stories Michelle told about her husband, the stories that are the point of the nominee's wife giving the speech in the first place.)

What we are looking at is a fall campaign between a politician and her fine-tuned campaign machine sending out a message about Hillary Clinton, on one hand, and a disruptive troublemaker trying to sabotage that message on the other. There will be no positive Trump vision. If he hasn't shown it by now, he doesn't have one. But Trump will now face trouble sending out even disruptive static, since he has actively trained the press to push back at him hard.

It's an old lesson: you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. I admit I didn't come up with that line myself. I borrowed it from a Republican.

cross-posed from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Losing the North: Republican Realignment

People have been asking if we're seeing a realignment of American electoral politics, with Donald Trump  scrambling the campaign map. There are no real signs of that yet: polls show the presidential electoral map unchanged so far, with the Democrats and Republican leading in the same states they carried last time and the time before that. The real story is the realignment that has already happened, without fanfare, over the past quarter-century. This Fourth of July weekend I'd like to talk about Maine and Vermont.

The largest political realignment of the last half century has been the movement of the Dixiecrats, the traditional Southern bloc of segregationist whites, out of their traditional home in the Democratic Party and into the GOP. That realignment took decades, and made uneven progress; some key Dixiecrats, such as Robert Byrd, remain Democrats for their entire lives while other figures, such as Strom Thurmond, literally switch party affiliation over the course of their careers. LBJ famously remarked after he'd signed the Civil Rights Bills that he'd likely signed away the South for a generation, and the results of his re-election campaign a few months later bear him out. (Here I'm going to use 270toWin's collection of historical electoral maps as the perfect digital visual aids.) Although LBJ absolutely destroyed Barry Goldwater in the 1964 landslide, Goldwater carried the five states of the Deep South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina), all traditional Democratic strongholds. That switch in party allegiance is all the more striking because those were the only states Goldwater carried except for his home state, Arizona.

But the realignment LBJ had been worrying about had already been solidly underway for at least sixteen years, since Thurmond's rebellion against Harry Truman and run for President on the third-party Dixiecrat ticket in 1948:

As you can see here,  four of those five deep-South states that defected to Goldwater in 1964 had already made an attempt to secede from the Democrats well before the Civil Rights Act. (Thurmond and his followers left the Democratic Party in a righteous rage over Harry Truman's allegedly radical civil rights agenda. That included things like desegregating federal housing projects and integrating the military. Some white Southerners were not only ready to walk but actually in process of walking before Brown v. Board of Education, the Bus Boycott, the Freedom Rides, and the rest of the classic Civil Rights Movement as we remember it.)

In 1968, there is yet another third-party run by another Southern Democrat, George Wallace, still angry about the Democratic position on civil rights but not entirely ready to turn Republican. In this map you can see some division and indecision: Texas voting Democratic, Arkansas and four of the five Deep South states voting for Wallace, and the rest of the South (including South Carolina) voting for Nixon. But from 1972 on, those states trend solidly Republican, part of Nixon's "Solid South." The South does vote for southern-boy Jimmy Carter in 1976, but abandons him for Reagan in 1980 (with Carter only carrying his native Georgia in the South). And in 1992 another Southerner, Bill Clinton, manages to take roughly half of the Southern States, and holds on to a little less than half in 1996.

But by 2000, even a Democratic nominee from the South can't get any purchase. Al Gore doesn't get a single electoral vote in the South, not even in his home state of Tennessee. From 1976 to 200 we go from the South willing to vote for a Democratic President, but only if he's a southerner, to the South willing to split its vote for a Democratic nominee from the South, to the South voting as a solid Republican wall no matter where the Democrat is from.

That's a striking and extremely important realignment. And it leaves us, by 2000, with our familiar red-state/blue-state battle lines. Each party has its own fairly stable electoral base, with a handful of swing states (Ohio, Florida, Colorado, etc.) in active play.

But I want to talk about a smaller development that we've overlooked. While the Southern tier was migrating to the Republican column, some long-time Republican strongholds have turned reliably blue. That includes what had been the two most reliably Republican states in the nation: Vermont and Maine.

Vermont and Maine have voted for the Democratic Presidential candidate in every single one of the last six elections, from 1992 to 2012. (Current polling, which could change, suggests that it will be seven in a row.) This in itself is not a huge deal, because those states are so small. They have only seven electoral votes between them, the equivalent of Oregon or Oklahoma. (Of course, in a polarized election, every little bit counts.) I'm more interested in Vermont and Maine as bellwethers of changing political coalitions. Since 1992 those two northern New England states have always voted Democratic in Presidential elections. Previously, they almost never did.

Vermont voted Republican in 33 of the previous 34 presidential elections, from 1856 to 1988. That's every presidential election from the founding of the Republican Party until the election of Bill Clinton. The single exception is the 1964 landslide in which LBJ blows out Goldwater. Maine voted Republican in 31 of those 34 presidential elections. The three exceptions are the Goldwater election of 1964, the second Dixiecrat uprising in 1968, and the 1912 "Bull Moose" election in which Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft split the Republican vote. (Vermont was one of only two states to stick by Republican incumbent Taft when his home state abandoned him.) For 132 years, Maine and Vermont were the two most reliably Republican states in the nation. This map shows how reliable they were: the only holdouts in FDR's 1936 re-election landslide.

One of the striking things about this is that Maine's turn against the Republicans in the Electoral College begins with a repudiation of George H. W. Bush, who is nominally a Texan but actually a prized resident of Maine. (GHWB voted from a hotel address in Houston but owned a home in Kennebunkport.) And then Maine went on to vote against another Bush twice, despite his local Down East ties.

What happened? How did Vermont and Maine go, over the last 80 years, from the most Republican of Republican strongholds to solid membership in the Democrats' national base?

Most of the stories we hear about changing party allegiances focus on urbanization and changing ethnic demographics. States become more Democratic as they become more urban, and as minority populations, especially African-American and Latino populations, grow. All of that is true enough, but none of it explains Maine or Vermont. Those states are still extremely rural. (I have been to Burlington, Portland, and Bangor, and they are all wonderful towns, but none of them will be mistaken for a major metropolis.Neither state has any city with even 100,000 inhabitants.) Furthermore, Vermont and Maine are the two whitest states in the union: Vermont is 94.3% non-Hispanic white, while Maine is a resplendently snowy 94.4% non-Hispanic white. (The two states' shared neighbor, New Hampshire, is 92.3% non-Hispanic white; Vermont and Maine are actually whiter than the White Mountains.) This is not about racial politics, or at least not in the terms we usually discuss it.

One possible explanation is Democratic voters moving to Vermont and Maine from other, more urban Northeastern states, bringing a more general Northeastern liberalism, and Democratic party loyalties from places like Hartford, Boston, and New York. There's at least some truth to this theory; Brooklyn-born Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is only the most obvious example.

But that is not the whole story. People have also been migrating to the Sun Belt without changing its social conservatism. And rural New England's social liberalism is not simply an urban import. The Vermont and Maine Republicans were traditionally socially liberal: not merely moderate Republicans but progressive and liberal Republicans. Remember, the Republicans were originally the civil-rights party, and the Northeast was originally one of their heartlands. It was Maine who sent Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican, to the US Senate for four terms.

Those voters don't fit terribly well with the Dixiecrats. And part of what we're seeing is that adding one of these groups to a party means that, over time, the other group will leave. It is basically a counter-realignment, a smaller response to the large movement of the Dixiecrats from the Republicans to the Democrats.

Look at that Goldwater map from 1964 again: Vermont and Maine flip blue when the Deep South flips red. Vermont, which had stuck by every single Republican candidate including Taft. abandons the Republican nominee that the South crosses party lines to vote for.

It's not that anyone articulates this. No one in Vermont or Maine announces, "I won't stay in the party with those Southerners!"  Nobody complains when a national election swings a party's way because a region that usually goes for the other side suddenly goes for yours. Northern Republicans like having majorities in Congress. But northern Yankee Republicans and Southern converts to Republicanism make strange bedfellows, who disagree strongly about the temperature of the bedroom. They have different cultures and different priorities. Their religious histories are different. As the old Dixiecrat bloc has become ascendant in the party, they have come to set an agenda that often leaves the old-school New England Yankees indifferent and sometimes actively upsets them. You can't keep both groups happy, and pleasing the (relative) newcomers means gradually driving the old guard into the other party.

This doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of Republicans left in Vermont, Maine, and the rest of New England. Of course there are. (Maine currently has a Tea Party governor who squeaked through in a four-way race and is currently antagonizing everyone in the state including the lobsters.)  Regions change political allegiance slowly, by fits and starts.  State and local Republicans can still win in Vermont and Maine even if Republican presidential nominees can't, just as conservative Democrats could keep winning state and local races in the South for years after it had switched its Presidential loyalties. (See: Senator Susan Collins (R-ME).) In fact, you can see a surprisingly large number of independents winning statewide office in Vermont and Maine, and to some degree in other New England states like Connecticut. For a while there, Vermont's three-person Congressional delegation included a Republican, a Democrat, and a Socialist Independent.

But I would suggest that all those independent officeholders are part of the region's piecemeal migration from the R to the D column. It's fairly rare for voters, much less career politicians, to switch parties after a certain age; party identity is an identity, too, and it's hard to switch sides. You have some official party-swapping in Northern New England, including some pretty high-profile examples, but you have many more examples where former Republicans simply become independents: disaffected from their original (and in some sense natural) party, but not willing to sign on with the Democrats yet. So you see former Republicans running as Independents, but also former Democrats running as Independents in order to appeal to that body of swing voters who've migrated away from the Republicans but aren't ready to call themselves Democrats. Senator Angus King (I-ME), who became an Independent in the 1990s, won both the governorship and a Senate seat with this strategy.

But you also can see dramatic switches happening in real time: back in 2001, Senator Jim Jeffords, (R-VT), a traditional Yankee Republican, left the party to become (I-VT), caucusing with the Democrats and handing the Senate majority over to the Democrats from the Republicans. Jeffords blamed George W. Bush. (That Bush did not know how to handle New England Republican Senators, despite the fact that his own grandfather had been a New England Republican Senator, tells you how much the party has changed.) But that's part of a larger story, in which the original, foundational base of the Republican Party, the heirs of the Lincoln Republicans, leave (or are driven off) because they can't co-exist with the party's new, post-Confederate base.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Trump and Consequences

This seems to be the week that it began to sink in, even among the people who had bought into the conventional Beltway wisdom: Trump means what he says. And this is Trump, the only Trump there is. He's not going to "pivot toward the general election" like the wised-up insiders have been saying he would. He's not capable of change. Trump is deeply dishonest, but he believes what he says. When he says that if he's elected he will do things that are destructive, illegal, or unconstitutional, we should believe him.

Donald Trump says he would change libel laws so he could punish journalists who make him angry, because that's what he wants to do. He attacks the judge presiding over his fraud lawsuit, because he would like to punish that judge. He talks about using the power of the Presidency to attack his personal enemies, as he sees them, because that is what he wants to do. Anyone who thinks that Trump would not do those things if given a chance is deluding him- or herself.

Up until now, the conventional wisdom among certain journalists, politicians, and assorted hacks has been not to worry about what Trump says, because in time he will follow the usual political script and do what the conventional wisdom expects. (As if Trump has followed the conventional script at any point up until now.) The wised-up types haven't been worried about what Trump says at his rallies because they pride themselves on being smarter than the audience, and Trump's act is so obviously phony that only an idiot would buy it. But they forgot that Trump actually is one of the idiots who buys Trump's act.

Donald J. Trump is suffering from a serious psychiatric disorder. (Disclosure: I am not a psychiatrist or a psychologist. On the other hand, I am not wrong.) That disorder is incurable, and Trump would refuse treatment if it were offered to him. He's a narcissist, and he likes himself this way. But that major personality disorder limits him. He can lie with enormous conviction, and then tell a contradictory lie with the same intense emotional belief a few seconds later. But what Trump cannot do is stop believing in his own lies. He has no sense of an authentic self outside of those lies. He's not a guy who puts on act to bullshit the rubes. The bullshit is his identity. He is the act, and he has no other character to play. So his psychiatric condition makes Trump enormously rigid in ways healthy people would not expect. He can change the details of the bullshit at lightning speed, but he can't change the basic act, because there's no Trump outside the act.

There's not going to be any "pivot" to a more presidential or conciliatory Trump for the general election. He's not capable of that. And if he were elected, there would not be any shift from campaign mode to governing mode. Hell, no. This is not campaign mode. This is Trump mode, the only mode he has. The only difference if he were elected would be that Trump's sense of grandiosity would be rewarded and intensified, to everyone else's danger, because Trump would be even more convinced that he could do anything he wants.

So the media has fed Trump's campaign, because he fits neatly into their crassest and most cynical business strategies. But if Trump wins, he will destroy the American media by attacking press freedom. Actions have consequences. Those who enabled Trump will pay the price, because Trump himself will punish them.

The Republican politicians making the craven decision to endorse Trump are likewise courting the destruction of their own party. I'm not sure what happens to the Republicans after a Trump loss, but I'm pretty sure a Trump victory would mean the end of the Republican Party. This is the predictable consequence of various party actors' actions.

Donald Trump is a liar, but we should take him at his word. If he is elected he will blow up America's foreign alliances, just as he says he would. He will attempt to deport 11 million people. He will run up a massive deficit with more tax cuts for millionaires, just as he promises. And he will bankrupt the country trying to pay for his asinine wall with Mexico, because he has talked about the wall so much that there is no going back. Trump can lie and backtrack, but he cannot bear to be seen backing down. He couldn't build the wall, because it's impossible and impractical. But he also can't not build the wall.

No one should be surprised at how crazy Trump is. He's been telling us at the top of his lungs for a year. But various people have, for their own reasons, tried to rationalize away Trump's obvious break with reason and treat him like a normal candidate. Those people have been extraordinarily reckless, and they have put our country in real danger. Trump should never have gotten this close. And those who have helped him should never be trusted again.

Trump will spend the next five months demonstrating how profoundly unfit he is. He can't help himself. But he will also be establishing, beyond any reasonable doubt, his enablers' unfitness for public trust. And those people had a choice.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Bill Weld Goes Rogue

So, William F. Weld, former Republican governor of Massachusetts, is running for Vice-President on the Libertarian ticket. That's a ridiculous thing, but it's a ridiculous year, and I'm less interested in this trivial fringe campaign than in what it says that Weld, who was once seen as a real comer in national politics, would even bother with this.

Now, let's get one thing out of the way: Weld has a very old connection to Hillary Clinton. They worked together as lawyers for the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate. Later, Bill Clinton appointed Weld to be US Ambassador to Mexico, an appointment sabotaged by Weld's fellow Republican Jesse Helms. (This after Weld had already resigned his governorship, so some real intraparty payback. Did I mention that Weld got his start in politics going after Nixon?)

So a conspiracy-minded type might see Weld's move as an attempt to help Clinton. Which, you know, it is. The whole goal here is to leach a few votes from Trump in the general election. But, like most conspiracy theories, it doesn't really make sense when you do a cost benefit analysis. Weld could probably help Clinton more by defecting to the Democrats outright, or by starting some Republicans Against Trump group. And there's no clear way for Clinton to pay Weld back after she wins. If Senate Republicans were willing to sabotage a Weld appointment in 1997, the 2017 Senate Republicans aren't about to welcome a new Weld nomination with open arms. So there's no payoff here. Weld has nothing to gain.

So why is someone like William Weld,  who has all the money and accomplishment he could possibly need, doing this? I think the answer is that the Republican Party, in his current incarnation, has orphaned him. William Weld has become a man without a party. He has nothing left to lose.

This is striking because Weld is as Old Republican Establishment as it comes. He's from a very old, very rich Boston family. The Welds aren't the kind of family who have a building at Harvard named after them. They're the kind of family that has two buildings at Harvard named after them. And that's a pretty short list. Weld is descended from a hero of the Massachusetts Indian wars, and from an important Union general from the Civil War. He's descended, on his mother's side, from a signer of the Declaration of Independence. (The F. in his name is from that ancestor, William Floyd.) When I say the Welds are Republican Establishment, I mean that some of the Welds were there when the Republican Party was established.

Oh, and Weld spent a quarter-century married to a Roosevelt. Teddy's side family, not Franklin's. These people are not Democrats.

Now that guy -- that guy! -- is running as a third-party spoiler to derail the Republican nominee. Something fundamental has changed.

There hasn't been a place for Weld's brand of socially-liberal, economically-conservative Republicanism in the party for a while now. (I've always suspected that Weld's version of Utopia would be the most inclusive and broad-minded country club imaginable.) Remember, Weld's ambassadorship got torpedoed by a hard-right race-baiter who'd started his career as a Democrat. Northern moderates and liberals have been squeezed out. (This is why former Republican Lincoln Chafee briefly ran for the Democratic nomination this year, like former Republican Jim Webb. Today's GOP has no room for Northern guys named "Lincoln.") But Weld is clearly not going to defect to the Democrats. Being Republican is part of, well, his DNA. He's got nowhere else to go. So now he's on the street making (extremely polite and wittily self-deprecating) trouble.

In the long run, this is going to be trivial. The Johnson/Weld ticket is not going into the history books as a game-changer. But it is a reminder that in turbulent times, the upheaval doesn't move in a single direction. The chaos takes many forms, in contradictory ways. It isn't that Trump gets to upend one of the major political parties and everybody else carries on as normal. Today a talented and loyal son of the Republican Party, a man whose Republican roots go back before Lincoln's election, has become an agent of electoral anarchy. We're living in weird times. And even the pros are getting weird.

cross-posted from (and all comments welcome at) Dagblog

The Republicans Are Now a Third Party

Dear Republicans: I see you couldn't help yourself. You've nominated Donald Trump for President of the United States. Really. His obvious psychological problems didn't stop you, or his obvious stupidity. They may have even been selling points. You are going to rue this day for a long time. But what's really remarkable is that you, who have been one of the two major parties for a century and a half, have nominated a third-party candidate for president. Congratulations, I suppose.

That is what Trump is: a classic third-party candidate, someone who is ultimately in the race as a protest against the establishment and who is there to advance issues that aren't on the major parties' agenda. Those candidates tend not to be electable themselves and not to have the qualifications they would need to actually do the job, because they aren't in the race to get elected. They are there to change the conversation. And that's certainly true of Trump. He couldn't do the job, and no reasonable person thinks he could. He doesn't even know what the President's job is.

("Separation of powers" is apparently a foreign concept to The Donald, because -- let's be honest here -- The Donald is a terrible American.)

You have nominated third-party-protest candidate Trump because you, the Republican Party, are now a protest-oriented third party. That's been increasingly true for a while, but now it's official. You're a third party in a second party's position, which is has been bad for the whole country. The system is designed for two parties, and it breaks down if one of them acts like a third party instead. The country pays a heavy price for that behavior, but your party is going to pay a heavier one.

You haven't had a governing agenda for years. I mean, you haven't even pretended. You've focused everything on opposing the Democrats, tearing down rather than building up, and you've focused most of all on things that you know you can never pass into law. That disregard for what can actually get done is the hallmark of a third party. What were all those dozens of votes to repeal Obamacare for, except to establish that you were a fringe party with no interest in anything but empty symbolism? When you vote for the same thing sixty-two times without doing it, you are telling the entire world that you don't matter and that you don't want to matter.

What about your endless parliamentary shenanigans and hostage-taking, repeatedly threatening to default on the national debt if you aren't given whatever fairly small-bore demand you're obsessed with on that particular week? That is the textbook tactic of a minority party in a multiparty system, like the fourth or fifth party extracting concessions by threatening to leave a governing coalition. You're basically like some goofy faction in the Italian parliament, or one of those tiny Israeli parties composed of idiot rabbis. They also demand what they want by threatening to bring down the whole government, and they also do it for relatively petty goals. That's what being a third or fourth party is about: being free from the burden of doing anything.

And then you pushed out your own Speaker of the House for the high crime of not actually shutting down the government or defaulting on the national debt. The crime of making deals. And there's nothing a third party hates more than making deals. They're usually free from that burden because they can't get to the bargaining table in the first place. That isn't your problem yet, but it will be. It might just take a while.

Nominating Trump makes it clear what you have become. At this point, you are nothing but an ethnic party, a vehicle for aggrieved white people's tribal animosities. Trump excels as a standard bearer for that party. He is totally miserable at building the wider coalition you would need if you ever want to win another national election. But your voters have spoken, and that's not what they want. They want to be the aggrieved losers. The good news is that everyone who lobbies for that job eventually gets it. Palookaville has plenty of space for you, and you can stay forever if you like.

Right now, the Trump Republican party is a rump Republican party, based on ethnic resentment. It's built on a coalition of the old Southern Dixiecrats and the uglier elements of the Reagan Democrats in the North and Midwest. Your party is now analogous to France's National Front, Italy's Northern League, the UK Independence Party, or the various right-wing nationalist parties in former Communist nations. Of course, there are many of you, and many long-term Republican constituencies, who don't fit in such a party. But right now, that race-based nationalist coalition is in charge, and the rest of you are being told to go along with the new party line or get out.

The Trump Republican party is just looking for white tribal advantage. Its core appeal is identity politics, expressed as demonization of outsiders: blacks, gays, Latinos, Muslims, transgender folks who need to pee. That would be enough to win a nationwide election in 1904. But it's not enough any more, not when you throw in some woman-bashing and a candidate who's unfit to govern. The basic appeal of the Trump candidacy is that any white man is more qualified than a black man or a woman, intelligence, experience, and fitness for office notwithstanding.

But this attempt to return to a white monopoly on political power comes just as demographic trends demand that a shrinking white majority share power with other ethnic groups. Indeed, it is largely a response to that truth, which Trump's supporters find upsetting. This white identity politics is enough to win you some elections, a lot of elections, on the state and local level, but not enough to win the White House. And that vote will only get less smaller over time.

Welcome to your third-party world, Republicans. Some of your party members will be leaving, of course, becoming independents or Democrats or members of some third party that knows it's a third party. A lot of your Wall Street and Chamber of Commerce wings will likely be heading for the exits. Maybe the next major party will coalesce in time around some of those ex-Republicans. Maybe the Democrats will eventually bifurcate. These realignments don't happen often in our history. Or maybe you'll turn it around and build your way back to major-party status. But you're going to spend a long time in the wilderness, because you're doing things that will take decades to live down. You can't run as the White Power Nationalist Front for one election and then just act like that never happened. Believe me, what you're doing right now is very, very memorable.

You can't nominate an openly unqualified candidate and expect people to keep taking your party seriously. If you don't take yourself seriously, why should we? And your establishment figures can't endorse Trump and keep their credibility. Those two things don't go together. If you are willing to stand next to Trump and smile, like one of his beauty pageant contestants, you've established that there's nothing you won't do. Why should we ever think you are motivated by substance?

You don't want to govern, Republicans. You've made that very clear. And you've also made it clear that you're no longer fit for the job. If that's not the message you meant to send, I'm sorry. That is the message that you have sent, and everyone else has heard it.

Cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

What Is John Kasich Thinking?

Where the heck have I been? Short answer: doing Shakespeare stuff. (Much more about that soon.) But now I'm back in Cleveland, where the Republican National Convention is on its way, John Kasich is governor, and no one understands exactly how these two things relate to each other. So let me ask an important question this election season: What on Earth is John Kasich thinking?

First, let's review the key facts: Governor John Kasich is one of the three candidates still actively running in the Republican presidential primary. Of those three candidates, Kasich is currently coming in fourth. That isn't a joke; Marco Rubio still has more delegates than John Kasich. Rubio quit a month ago, just at the moment when winning Ohio convinced Ohio Governor John Kasich that he was in it to win it.

But coming in behind Rubio doesn't matter, because Kasich can't actually win a majority of delegates anyway. I don't mean "can't" is in "won't" but "can't" as in "mathematically impossible." Kasich was mathematically eliminated from the election weeks ago. I am not making any of this up. I could not make any of this up.

This, by the way, is the one billed as the sane, reasonable, practical Republican.

What could explain this seemingly irrational behavior? I see three possibilities, two of which explain the apparent irrationality as some degree of actual irrationality.

First, Kasich could simply be in denial. Getting close to the Presidency at all, even being a dark horse candidate for the nomination, can do strange and terrible things to the human mind. Once you've seen that possibility in front of you, it can be hard to accept that the chance has gone by forever.  (As a sidebar, some of the current tactical nastiness on the Democratic side might be explained by exactly this: getting close enough to make the possibility seem real while being far enough behind that it's already slipped through your fingers. It can take a while to work those feelings through.) Don't judge. This is a psychological temptation that most of us never face.

I'm going to call this the One Ring scenario, in which the power of the Presidency is so powerful that having it between your fingers, even for a few moments, will drive you obsessively mad. In this scenario, Kasich is Gollum, obsessively chasing a prize that he has long since lost.

The second possibility is the modified One Ring scenario, in which Kasich is not completely irrational but only mostly irrational. Kasich may well have set his heart on stealing the nomination at the convention, partly assisted by the fact that the convention itself will be in his home state (you know, the only state he's actually won). This makes Kasich Saruman rather than Gollum: trusting in his own guile to get the prize, but with a plan that's too clever by half and that also badly underestimates the sheer force of other claimants. (Is Trump Sauron in this scenario? He has all the best orcs! He's going to build a wall and make Gondor pay for it!)

Now, I've been talking up the contested-convention scenario on this blog for months now, and it remains a possibility. But sometime over the last month people started talking about a contested convention as a sure thing. That sudden hardening of conventional wisdom is alarming. And the truth is denying Trump the 1237 delegates he needs will be a close, close thing if it happens. Not to mention the fact that if he comes up a few short, people will say the highest vote-getter should win. Not to mention that if Trump somehow fails, it will be very hard to deny the nomination to Cruz.

If Kasich thinks that holding the convention in Cleveland will give him enough local advantage to take the presidential nomination away from TWO candidates who've BOTH beaten the hell out of him in 49 primaries and caucuses, he is being totally delusional about how much home-town advantage counts. One little stronghold is not enough, Saruman.

But what if Kasich is actually acting rationally? And what if I dropped the Tolkien analogies completely? Let's call the third scenario The Kingmaker Scenario. In this, Kasich is still betting on some form of contested convention, or at least preparing himself in case it happens. But rather than imagining himself as the white knight anointed in Cleveland to save the Grand Old Party from, umm, its voters, what if Kasich imagines himself as a player trying to strike the best possible deal? (Oh, fine. Let's call him Tyrion Lannister. Happy now?)

Kasich may know that he's not getting the crown, but see the possibility of getting something for himself at a contested convention because his little pile of delegates may make or break someone else. If neither Trump nor Cruz comes in to Cleveland with a majority, Kasich may be able to extract some promise from one of them in exchange for his votes, perhaps even the VP nomination.

Is that what Kasich is doing? I have no idea. Machiavellian cunning doesn't announce its plans to the public, and delusions don't always explain themselves well. If Kasich is really playing the angles, he has to pretend like he's still trying to win the election. If Kasich is too self-deluded to play the angles, we won't know until July. And if he is hoping to make a deal, it's not clear if there's a line he would draw. Is he hoping to put Cruz over the top? Or would he make the same deal with Trump? There's no way to know yet.

And let me tell you: here in Cleveland, the suspense is not a lot of fun.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Dear Republicans: You Did This. You Fix It.

Dear Republicans: I know that many of you are upset by Donald Trump's rise. I know that many of you are horrified. But let's be frank. This is your party. You did this. I won't walk through the details. But the thing speaks for itself: the Republican Party planted the seeds for this, cultivated those seeds through campaign season after campaign season, and now they have borne strange fruit.

You did this. You have to fix it.

I've heard some talk from various pundits about what Democrats or liberals should do to stop Trump. Some pundits talk about how we should vote in the Republican primary to shore up this or that anti-Trump. Some people have already begun muttering about how the Democratic nominee will need to use restraint against Trump in the general, about not stooping to his level, all of which is simply an attempt to impose rules to limit how the Democratic nominee campaigns. To all of that I say: no.

The Republicans did this, and the Republicans need to fix it. If you cannot keep Trump from becoming your nominee, we will take things into our own hands by beating him in the general. And don't you dare tell us how to campaign. We will beat Trump by any means required, because the health of our Republic demands it. You don't get to build the monster, lose to the monster, and then tell us all the ways we're not allowed to fight the monster. You beat him yourself, or you let us do it and don't complain about how.

If you can't stop Trump in the primaries, you need to stop giving us advice. If Trump gets to the general election, it's your turn to listen to us. You need to do your duty to America and vote for Hillary Clinton.

You don't want to vote for Hillary Clinton, or for Bernie Sanders? I get it; I understand that you're Republicans. In your shoes, I wouldn't want to vote for your party's nominee. But I'm not in your shoes, because my party isn't about to nominate a dangerous and shamefully unqualified demagogue to the highest office in the land. We're deciding between a competent pragmatist and a seasoned idealist. You're about to nominate a race-baiting realtor with florid psychiatric symptoms. Our party doesn't do that. Yours does. There is a price to pay for that.

And don't tell me that Hillary Clinton is just as bad as Donald Trump. You know that is a lie. And lies like that are how your party got so far adrift in the first place. It's time to stop lying to yourselves and to face the real world. There's no place left to hide.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog