He Knows He's Losing: Trump as Mike Tyson

The most obvious thing to me about last night's toxic sludge fire of a debate is that Trump knows he's losing. Bigly. And he has no idea what to do about it. Many pundits are confused on this point, because they treat Trump as a conventional politician or as a media figure rather than as a psychiatric patient. And if you don't view Trump through the lens of his maladies, you misunderstand him. Trump is not a serious politician. Comparing him to other Republican presidential candidates doesn't help you understand him. This is not Mitt Romney. Let me compare him instead to someone Trump does resemble, deeply: Mike Tyson.

Back in 1997, just before Tyson's infamous rematch with Evander Holyfield, the Boston Globe's boxing columnist, a guy named Ron Borges, predicted that if Tyson couldn't beat Holyfield in the first three rounds, he'd try to disqualify himself. Tyson no longer had the stamina for a full-length championship bout, Borges explained, although he still had a furious opening attack that had won him some matches, and even a heavyweight belt, with early knockouts. But if he couldn't knock out Holyfield by the third, Tyson had no chance. He would only get weaker as the match stretched on. So he'd try to disrupt the match and get a DQ instead.

Holyfield won the first three rounds. In the third, Tyson bit off part of Holyfield's ear.

What people forget is that Tyson bit Holyfield's ear twice, because the referee didn't stop the fight after Tyson had actually chomped off part of his opponent's ear. (If you want to make a comparison to last night's debate moderation here, feel free.) So Tyson bit Holyfield again.

This was crazy, but not spontaneous. It was Tyson's plan. He actually came out for the third round without his mouth guard, which is a crazy thing to do if a heavyweight contender is about to punch you in the mouth over and over again, but efficient tactical preparation if your plan for the upcoming round is to bite some dude. The ref made him put it back in. Tyson came out of his corner looking to get thrown out of the fight. When biting didn't work, he kept biting until he got thrown out. Then he threw a tantrum blaming the referee.

What we witnessed last night was an attempt to bite off the opponent's ear, to look for a DQ rather than take a public beating. Trump destroyed the debate because he had no legitimate way to win, and he knew it. He can't stand on a stage with Joe Biden for ninety minutes in a conventional, legitimate debate. I mean, what would he talk about? His record? He can't afford to do that. Trump has no affirmative case to make for his presidency beyond childishly obvious lies. So his goal was to keep Biden from talking. His handlers talk about how he was trying to goad Biden into some gaffe, and maybe that's part of the truth, but I think Trump's handlers don't understand the real goal: keep Biden from talking so Biden couldn't score any points. Trump couldn't beat Biden, so he tried to derail the match so Biden wouldn't be seen beating him.

This strategy only intermittently worked. Sometimes Biden was rattled, because it's hard to have a serious conversation while a floridly symptomatic mental patient shrieks at you. But when Biden got a chance to breathe and focus for 45 seconds, especially when he spoke directly to the camera, it became very clear why Trump couldn't afford to let Biden speak for any longer than that.

Here's the thing: this is not a strategy for a candidate who's behind, and Trump is behind. Keeping Biden from gaining more ground on him isn't a win. Biden's ahead by 7 or eight points. Trump needed to use the debate to close some of that gap, and ruining the debate, getting the DQ, doesn't do that. (To switch sports metaphors briefly, it's the equivalent of trying to get the last innings of a baseball game canceled when the other team is ahead. If you're losing after six innings, you don't want the last three rained out, because then you lose.) So this was less strategy than pathology.

Getting DQ'd out of the Holyfield match was not to Tyson's advantage. Getting disqualified is not better than losing. It's actually much worse. Not only did Tyson forfeit the match, he lost his boxing license and got fined millions of dollars. It would be much better to fight through the next twelve rounds, take his lumps, and lose honestly. But that would have meant Tyson letting people see him lose. Instead, no matter how high and insanely self-destructive the cost, he preferred to end the match and keep the option of pretending he might have won. Tyson was willing to throw his career in the toilet in order to shift blame for his defeat onto the ref.

Trump, like Tyson, can not accept or admit defeat. He would rather hurt his campaign than have the experience of letting Joe Biden beat him on live TV. But doesn't that invite the even greater humiliation of having Joe Biden beat him on Election Night? Yes, but here's the thing: Trump knows he can't win the election either.

Let me say that again: Trump knows he cannot win this election. He knows he cannot get more votes than Biden, that he will lose the popular votes by millions. Listen to him, if you can stomach it: this man who constantly boasts never boasts about the vote count he's going to rack up, because he's read the polls. He knows he's losing. No one associated with the Trump campaign talks about the popular vote. They have given up hope of winning it.

They barely, if ever, even talk about the Electoral College. Trump doesn't brag about which states he's ahead in. Because he doesn't have a strong lead in any state with more than about 11 electoral votes. He's way behind, playing defense on most of his map. He's going to have to defend Georgia and Texas.

Instead, Trump talks about voter fraud and Supreme Court rulings and voter intimidation. He's shouting that it's going to be stolen, because he knows he's losing.

We should take this very seriously, because it represents a genuine threat to our election. He's shouting that the election is going to be stolen because he wants to steal it if he can.

But even more important to Trump is ruining the election itself, disrupting it the way he disrupted the debate. Even if he can't hold onto power, he wants to avoid the humiliating spectacle of public defeat. Trump knows he can't win. He's looking for the DQ. You saw him last night. He's already taken out his mouthpiece.

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

 

The Mayor from Jaws Explains Those Quotes He Gave to Bob Woodward

 

Everyone knows I want to be a cheerleader for Amity Island, right? You want to project confidence. So while I might have told some reporter from the mainland that we were facing “a  grotesque, Biblical monster of the deep,” “a bloody, churning nightmare of teeth,” or “a lean, mean tourist-eating machine,” there was no reason to tell the general public that. You don’t want to start a panic, fellas. Just think of the kids.

On the subject of kids, the media’s distorting my comment about the unfortunate Kitner boy being “a fit offering and sacrifice to our mighty fish-god Dagon” completely out of context. First of all, I was brought up never to criticize someone else’s religion. I don’t know how you were raised. Second, if I have the worshipers of Dagon right – and they’ve been fine, upstanding members of our Chamber of Commerce – then Dagon brings wealth and prosperity not just to his followers, but to the whole community. Who wouldn’t like a little more prosperity, am I right? Here on Amity Island we depend upon the ocean for our very lives. So you gotta keep those obscene, scaly, aquatic monster gods happy.

Look, if it wasn’t for me, this whole island would descend into real darkness and bloodshed. I’m talking about roaming mobs of young radical leftists – some of them nearly four foot ten – destroying our picket fences with their karate. If my opponent is elected Mayor, they’ll just run wild. Then the only white, pointed pickets you’ll see will be the row upon row of pitiless shark teeth closing down on you. I think I got off the subject somehow.

When I told that reporter, “We want to play this down, so the suckers don’t avoid the beaches,” I simply meant that it was time to reopen our beaches and our economy. It’s lost business that’s the real killer: not just people, but whole communities. Do you want to kill our community? Maybe I should quote you in a newspaper.

So it’s exactly what I was saying on twitter at the time, except a few minor details about the insatiable marine predator Carcharodon carcharias. Twitter has a character limit, as you’re well aware.

And when I said that “We should get everyone we can to go swimming and thrash wildly in the closest possible imitation of a distressed seal,” I was simply calling upon the spirit of loyalty and public service in our nearly 346-year-old community and its citizens. “Amity,” as you know, means friendship.

When I said “Have you seen some of those off-island girls’ bikinis? I wouldn’t mind eating them myself,” that was simply boat-locker talk, and a compliment to our beautiful young guests and the fashionable swimwear for sale here in our town. Life’s too short to get upset about stuff like this, particularly with a frenzied cartilaginous fish honed to homicidal perfection by millions of years of evolution around to shorten it.

 I don’t think the voters are going to hold a little banter against me any more than they did last election, when I was recorded talking about inviting Chief Brody’s wife for “a little midnight harpoon practice.” And speaking of the Chief, I don’t expect voters to mind me hoping “the shark eats that snotty New York bastard, so I can show his widow my blow hole.” People from New York can be prickly. 

 No one cares what I may or may not have said to a famous investigative journalist who explicitly asked permission to record me. Who are you going to believe? All that matters is, the sun is shining, the beaches are full, and we’re going to have the best Fourth of July we’ve ever had. You’re the one who says it’s September. I prefer to be an optimist.

Should Our Allies Hack Our Elections?

Two things about the Mueller report are not up for debate: the Russians interfered in our last election, and no one is going to do anything about that. One party is hobbled by the need for bipartisanship, and the other so blinded by partisanship that they'll treat attempts to ward off foreign interference as political attacks on their own side. While we're making this about Trump, out foreign adversaries are preparing to attack our elections again. We haven't punished them or done anything to stop them, so why would they stop? All we've done is give them time to improve their methods.

But it won't just be the Russians. It will be other hostile intelligence services. The Chinese, certainly. The North Koreans. Maybe the Iranians, surely the Saudis. Everyone might as well try, since we've created no downside for them. They get a risk-free shot at influencing American policy against American interests, and if that fails they still get to weaken us. No matter what happens, we lose and they don't.

The question, if we're going to allow foreigners to hack our elections without doing anything about it except saying they shouldn't, is at what point even our allies have to join in. If your nation's most important ally is allowing hostile powers to interfere in its elections, and those hostile powers want to weaken your alliances and harm your national interests, at what point do you have a duty to try to sway American elections yourself? When does it get so bad that the French have no choice but to hack us?

Let me very clear: I am absolutely opposed to any foreign power meddling in our elections. I don't want the French or Germans or Canadians messing with this any more than I want the Russians and Saudis and North Koreans. Every foreign power should stay the hell out.

But if we don't stop outside meddlers, outsiders will meddle, and the number of meddlers will only grow.

When I am trying to think through something strategically, I try to imagine myself not as the other party, but as someone charged to give that other party the best advice possible. Instead of thinking about what I want, or what I hope or think or imagine the other side wants, I try to imagine what I would tell the other side to do if I were an adviser with a duty to lay out all the options. That gets me away from wishful thinking to strategic realities.

If I were a Canadian (or Frenchman or German) staffing Justin Trudeau or Emanuel Macron or Angela Merkel, I would have to put forward hacking the American elections as an option to consider, and I would have to make sure to offer the prime minister (etc.) a plan to do that effectively. No one counseling them can take that option off the table.

If you're Justin Trudeau, you're facing a real danger of your neighbor to your south crashing your economy, and his own, and Mexico's, for no particularly good reason. The President of the United States routinely threatens to shut borders and disrupt North America's integrated supply chains. That is hard to stomach on its own, because if Trump crashes the whole NAFTA trade bloc Trudeau's voters will be out of work and nothing else will get accomplished but dealing with economic catastrophe. But it's all especially hard to take when this danger actually comes from a foreign power. Should Trudeau let Russia do this to Canada? Would you let them? Or would you do what it took to protect your country?

Hacking our elections on the side of positive values and international commitments would be harder than just sowing chaos and tearing down responsible leaders, as the Russians have done. It has always been harder to build than to destroy, and it's almost impossible on Facebook. But on the other hand, our allies have a better sense of our culture than our enemies do. But if it comes to running psy ops against us, the Canadians have a built-in advantage. Who knows us better?

This will of course, be a disaster, and part of a larger disaster, as friendly and hostile countries play cloak and dagger to swing Rust Belt electoral votes. It's a nightmare. It's also probably inevitable.

The only way to stop it is to protect our country's elections, for real. And our political establishment isn't ready to do that.

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

The International League of Dark Money

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are bent on destroying the peaceful international order that the United States built after World War II. They're hostile to the World Trade Organization, NATO, you name it. But Trump is not the only complicit American here. Because Trump and Putin are champions are a very different, more lawless international order, which many wealthy Americans participate in and derive benefit from: the international league of dark money.

Whatever else does or doesn't bind Trump and Putin, they're united by their dependence upon international money laundering, which moves large amounts of cash across borders in disguised transactions. Putin's oligarchs routinely move their dirty money into the West through shady means, and Trump's real estate business has become heavily dependent on Russian customers whose money should not be examined too closely. The Trump Organization may not actually launder money, but they accept a lot of well-fluffed money straight out of the laundry room. Both Trump and Putin have strong vested interests in keeping the dark money flowing and keeping it out of sight.

They're not alone. There is a robust international infrastructure of shell companies, off-shore banks, and shady middlemen devoted to moving money around while disguising where it comes from. This is especially convenient for people who can't admit where how they got that money or even that they have it. Money laundering allows corrupt government officials in Russia or Nigeria to spend their graft in the West. It allows organized criminals to spend their profits from drugs, gun-running, and human trafficking. And it allows international terrorists to fund operations overseas. So there are strong reasons for the world community, working through the post-WWII international order, to close the flow of laundered money down.

Without access to money laundering, big-time criminals would not be able to use most of their ill-gotten money, because to spend it they would need to explain where they got it. Without access to money laundering, money stolen by corrupt officials could only be spent in the same country those officials help to impoverish. Without money laundering, terrorists could not support sleeper cells in foreign countries or fly volunteers to battle areas. A world where every bank transaction was transparent and on the level would be a better and safer place.

But the money-laundering infrastructure also enables tax evasion. (I mean, no one launders money so they can pay taxes on it.) And many wealthy and prominent people in America and the rest of the developed West use their legal resources to evade taxes. They use shelters and shell companies and foundations to avoid paying their full share of the tax burden, to pass on multi-million-dollar inheritances tax free, and to disguise some of the ways they spend their money. Take a look at the Panama Papers some time, which opens to a window on a single law firm's efforts to get around tax laws for its clients. You see both Russian oligarchs and Western celebrities and politicians, including a former British Prime Minister, in those pages. Lots of nominally law-abiding people rely on offshore accounts and tax havens and largely fictitious legal entities to keep from paying taxes like the rest of us. Closing down the money-laundering system on criminals and terrorists would also close down the tax-evasion system on otherwise legitimate rich people. After all, they're the same system.

Trump and Putin want a world where legal and financial accountability stops at every border, where moving money overseas moves it out of the authorities' sight forever. The existing maze of international loopholes, which already allows tens of billions of secret dollars to flow through anonymous bank accounts, is still too transparent for them. So they want to destroy any lawful international agencies which might have the tools to close down the dark money. They want a world without effective international institutions, because only international institutions can effectively fight money laundering.

But you will find plenty of well-placed Americans and Europeans who don't want international financial controls, either. They want their shell companies and make-believe charitable foundations and secret accounts in the Caymans. They might not care much for Putin. They might detest the jihadists or the Mafia or the Crips. But they won't support the steps necessary to close down Putin or the Crips, because that would mean closing down other businesses that they actually own. It is just one of the many ways that elements of our ruling class are complicit in Russia's attacks on this country.

cross-posted from Dagblog; please comment there, not here

On the

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

Ask the Blue States About Terrorism

Here are a few pictures from Copley Square in Boston, where the Boston Marathon ends:

But as you can see, they are not from April's running of the Marathon. They are from a January demonstration against Trump's Muslim Ban.

And yes, that means that Boston held a massive demonstration for Muslim immigrants' rights right next to the site of a shocking terrorist attack by two Muslim immigrants. Just for logistical reasons, a lot of protestors must have had to walk across the Marathon's finish line, and by the sites of the bombs themselves.

A sign that Boston has forgotten the Marathon bombings? Oh hell no. They are still all too fresh in that city's mind. A sign that Bostonians don't care about the victims, or aren't serious about fighting terrorism? Don't be ridiculous.

A small explanation is that Copley Square happens to be Boston's best place for large gatherings like this, so that you have the crowds of protestors in the same public square where you have the crowds of cheering running fans. But the bigger explanation is that Boston, like many so-called blue cities, is both anti-terrorist and pro-immigrant. If that seems not to make sense to you, let me just say: these people are literally standing in a place that they know terrorists have attacked. They are literally putting themselves on the line here, so you maybe you should hear them out.

One of the oddities of American political life today is that our approach to terrorism is being dictated by the people in the least danger of a terrorist attack.


Here are the top US targets for foreign terrorists:
New York City
Washington, DC
Los Angeles
Chicago
San Francisco

Maybe San Francisco makes that top tier, and maybe it belongs in the next one, with places like Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, Seattle, etc. etc. etc. But let's be honest: if Al-Qaeda or Daesh aka "ISIS" spends months planning a complicated attack on US soil, it's almost certainly going to be in one of those four or five top targets. Those are the places they care about; those are the places they've heard about. And those are the places that have large symbolic value overseas. International Islamist terrorists dream of destroying LAX and Times Square and the Capitol Dome. They are not interested in the so-called American Heartland. Islamist terrorists from overseas would never attack Oklahoma City, for example, because they don't really know where Oklahoma City is.

Now, that doesn't mean that Oklahoma City isn't a great place to live. It can be wonderful without being internationally famous. I've lived in a bunch of places that overseas terrorists have never heard of, and those places were nice. But the truth is terrorists aren't interested in underrated places that are nice to live. They're interested in attacking famous places. I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, but national security is more important than your feelings or mine.

Now one of the things animating our red/blue split is a deep division on what to do with terrorism. Everyone agrees that terrorism is a serious problem. The general Red Team approach to terrorism is that this is a deep national emergency that calls for shutting down immigration, increased military strikes overseas, and heavy ethnic profiling of Muslims: in some cases outright demonization of Islam itself. The Blue Team strategy calls for a mix of police and military responses with diplomacy, patience and outreach. The Blue strategy is built around trying to isolate the terrorists and sharpen the divide between them and everyday Muslims. The Red strategy considers that a hopeless cause, and demands that we use the hammer as hard as we can, everywhere. Sometimes it considers Islam itself the problem. Blue voters see making the fight about Islam itself as one of the worst and most self-destructive things to do: basically pushing people into the terrorists' arms.

Now, these strategies work against each other. You can only follow one. Either you're doing outreach to Muslims, or you're denouncing Islam. And both sides feel that the other strategy is dangerous and self-destructive.

Because we're a democracy, we resolve this conflict by voting. And over the last few elections, the Red voters have won, and we're following the Red strategy. But here's the problem:

The places that the terrorists target are overwhelmingly Blue, full of Blue voters. New York, Chicago, LA, DC, San Francisco: all super blue. Almost, like, ultra-violet. A lot of the second tier targets are likewise blue: either the Democratic strongholds of Democratic states, or the Blue island in a Red or Purple State. Boston. Miami. Philly. Seattle. If terrorists ever attack Missouri, God forbid, it will be in Democratic-voting St. Louis. If, God forbid, terrorists attack Georgia, it will be in central Atlanta. That's how the terrorists' strategy works. They want large, busy, and well-known urban areas.Those are the places that are pro-urban, pro-trade, and generally pro-immigrant. They are also the places where the most American immigrants are.

In fact, the Red strategy has one precisely because it's favored in less populated rural areas. More people vote for Blue candidates, both for President and for Congress, but our system builds in an advantage for rural districts so that a smaller number of voters defeat a larger, but more geographically concentrated, group of voters.

So we're following the Red anti-terrorism strategy, but the Blue voters are the targets. They are the ones at risk. If we try the Blue strategy and fail, it's Blue voters whose lives are at risk. But if we follow the Red strategy and it fails, most of the Red voters will still be safe in their rural areas. Their mistakes won't get them killed. Daesh (aka "ISIS") is not going to be launching any attacks on Youngstown, Ohio or rural Wisconsin. Not now, and probably not ever.

So let me suggest that maybe the Blue-state voters, and the urban-blue-pocket voters may know what they're doing. They may have actually thought this through. Don't tell them that they don't take terrorism seriously. A lot of them live in New York City. And even if they are wrong, they deserve to be listened to, because they have skin in the game -- sometimes all of their skin in the game -- in the way most of the rest of us do not. If you find yourself puzzled and frustrated by the politicians and the policies they vote for, the approach to fighting terrorism that they support, let me translate what those urban Blue voters are saying to the rest us:

Publicly hating Islam is not helping. Stereotyping people is not helping. You are making it worse. Please, please don't get us killed. Thanks. 

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

About Julius Caesar

So those literary geniuses, Fox News and Donald Trump, Jr., have decided to attack a "New York play" that they allege stages the assassination of Donald Trump. It is, of course, Shakespeare in the Park's production of Julius Caesar. And of course, Fox and Trump's loyal followers don't need to actually see the play to raise an enormous outcry, because denouncing people is too much fun for fact-checking.

It makes me sad, because Julius Caesar has been more important to America than any of Shakespeare's other plays. It was the play most taught in American schools for many decades, because it speaks about questions at the heart of the American experiment: about the nature of a republic and the duties we owe it, about the danger of tyrants and the dangers of civil violence. It's sad to see a public debate based on ignorance about this play.

So, alas, it's time for a special edition of Ask Me About Shakespeare, coming to you this time from Washington, DC, where I'm spending a month at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Let's take it away:

How much of this production was paid for by the NEA? (-Don T., NYC, via twitter)

None of it. Nada. Zilch.


When does a play like this verge into political speech? (-Don T., NYC, via twitter)

It's a play about the Dictator of Rome. It is and has always been about politics. Its central subject is politics. Every major male character is a Roman politician. Come on.

Does that change things? (-Don T., NYC, via twitter)

In that political speech has even more protection under the First Amendment, maybe. Political speech is a guaranteed Constitutional right.

Okay, but Shakespeare isn't about current politics.

Isn't he? Julius Caesar has been used to comment on current politics over and over again. It's been used to critique the rise of Mussolini. And at least once it's been used to implicitly comment on Obama in the same implicit way that Shakespeare in the Park is implicitly pointing at Trump.


One of the basic rules of understanding Shakespeare's history plays is that he is always more interested in the history of his own day than the history he is writing about. Always.

How is it still Shakespeare if it's in modern dress?

People have been doing "modern dress" Shakespeare for more than a hundred years at this point. Let's not act like it's some crazy novelty. And Shakespeare and his partners did "modern dress" themselves; they did Julius Caesar in 16th-century clothes, probably with a few "Roman" costume pieces thrown into the mix. People don't start putting Julius Caesar in togas until the 1800s.

The Public Theater, which stages Shakespeare in the Park, follows a standard rule about modern dress: they change costumes, in ways that are meant to work as visual footnotes, so that Roman senators for example dress like American senators. But they stick faithfully to Shakespeare's actual words and never add any modern language.

This play is not an adaptation of Julius Caesar. It really is Julius Caesar.

Why is Caesar killed by women and minorities? (-Fox N., NYC)

Because the Public Theater has, for the last fifty years or so, been a pioneer in cross-casting across gender and race. Fox News may object to this as political correctness, but it's a way of opening up parts to a wider range of American actors and ultimately making the pool more competitive. It's hard to find good Shakespeareans. Letting talented actors of color into the casting mix, and giving women a wider range of roles to play, definitely improves the overall standard of acting. This has now become standard practice; the last two professional Shakespeare plays I saw (one in DC, and one in Staunton, Virginia) cast across race and gender lines.

If you ever have a choice between seeing a mid-tier white male British actor do Shakespeare and seeing James Earl Jones do Shakespeare, by all means go with James Earl Jones. It's the American thing to do, and you won't be sorry.

But doesn't that look like Trump?

Yes, vaguely. Clearly, the Public is okay with people drawing that connection, which a lot of the audience was probably going to read into this play at this moment anyway. Much the same way that casting African-American Caesars during the last Administration let people draw the Obama connection.

But they aren't calling that character Trump, and Julius Caesar's lines are (how to put this?) deeply unlike the way our current President speaks.

But Shakespeare never depicted a living public figure on stage.

Didn't he? Actors and playwrights in his day were specifically forbidden to depict living people on stage, but they pretty clearly did it anyway. Loves Labors Lost is none-too-subtly about a particular king of France, and gives its King a posse of friends named after actual French noblemen.

Part of Shakespeare's costume inventory was clothing that various noblemen had gotten rid of once it went out of fashion. So there's always been the possibility that his actors could signal a topical reference by dressing like the political figure they were mocking, dressing in the man's actual clothes. Once, a while after Shakespeare died, his acting company bought a much-hated Spanish ambassador's sedan chair when that ambassador went back to Spain. When they carried one of their bad guys around stage in that chair, everyone knew who they meant.


So, they're endorsing Trump's assassination, right?

There is no way that Julius Caesar endorses Caesar's assassination. It is clearly a terrible thing to do, and all of the assassins are punished.

In fact, all of the conspirators except Brutus are clearly self-interested and immoral.  (As Antony says of Brutus:

All of the conspirators but only he
Did what they did in envy of great Caesar.)

Let's go to the Public Theater's own website to describe the play. In its director's words:

"Julius Caesar can be read as a warning parable to those who try to fight for democracy by undemocratic means.
To fight the tyrant does not mean imitating him." – Oskar Eustis

Eustis is right that the play presents both Caesar AND his assassins as dangers to the public. Caesar is a tyrant in the making, who is destroying the Roman Republic and replacing it with an autocracy. But his assassins are, well, assassins. They traffic in blood, and threaten Rome as much as Caesar does.

And this, of course, is why earlier productions could invite an Obama reading: that reading is that Obama is being attacked by these vicious politicians.

The joke here is that Julius Caesar depicts Caesar's enemies pretty much the way most of the people denouncing the play see Trump's critics: as a pack of conspirators who envy the great man's greatness.

Then who's the good guy?

Shakespeare's play doesn't have simple bad guys and good guys. That is why the play is still worth reading. It's morally complicated, just as the world we live in is.


But they show him being murdered on stage!

In the original script. It's been like this since around 1599. And that assassination scene is not designed to make you all excited about assassinations. Oh God, no.

No one treated Democratic presidents like this.
 
Maybe you should read Barbara Garson's Mac Bird! which specifically adapts Macbeth as a critique of LBJ.

Well, they should have left Trump out of it.

They can't. I couldn't be more sorry to tell you this, but there's no way to do that right now. People will make the Trump connection whether you want them to or not.

I just spent a semester teaching Shakespeare's history and tragedies, a semester that started about a week before inauguration. And I never discuss current politics in my classroom, least of all with undergraduates. I never said Trump's name in the classroom. But my students wanted to make the connection, over and over again.

Richard III reminded them of Trump. Hamlet's uncle reminded them of Trump. Macbeth reminded them of Trump. And those characters are much clearer villains than Caesar is. We got to an example of tyranny, or demagoguery or political dishonesty, and I had to keep students from talking about Trump. It got exhausting after a while.

Trump is on everyone's minds. He kind of insists on being on everyone's minds. And so people are going to connect him to plays like Julius Caesar.

Look, it's a play where a successful politician, who attracts huge rallies of the common people, is seen as a threat to centuries of democratic government. That politician has a band of dedicated enemies who are motivated by a mix of patriotism, rancor, and envy. 

You don't have to say Trump to get audiences thinking about Trump. (In fact, Shakespeare in the Park literally never says the word "Trump.") The audience is going to make the connection to Trump no matter what. It's inevitable. So there's a logic to just letting them do that and running with it. This has to be the Julius Caesar about the beginning of Trump's presidency, because no audience is going to let it be anything else.

Well, is Shakespeare really any guide to today's politics?

More than two centuries of American politicians have thought so. And Julius Caesar is also a play about the danger of propaganda and mob fury in politics. It's a play about lying to the people to get them angry. Mark Antony is a gifted orator and a smooth liar, who eventually whips the common people into a murderous frenzy based on falsehoods and distortions and then sends them out to do violence. 

In fact, one of the key scenes in the play has a mob murder a poet whom they've mistaken for someone else. That happens onstage too.

So, angry people on Twitter, remember: Julius Caesar is also a play about the dangers of being whipped up into an angry, undiscriminating mob. Maybe you should log off for a bit and give it a read.

(cross-posted from Dagblog, where comments are welcome. Comments are closed on this site.) 

Fairy Tale Promises: The Brexit, Conservatives, and Trump

The shocking result of the "Brexit" referendum, with Britain leaving the European Union, has widely been taken as Good News for Donald Trump. He was happy to say so himself, and to attempt to take credit somehow for the referendum's success. And people have been panicking about the danger that Trump's campaign could beat the conventional wisdom just as the British "Leave" campaign did. That danger is probably overrated, as Jamelle Bouie points out: the UK is much whiter than the US, so the angry white vote doesn't carry as far here any more, and we should remember that the Brexit result wasn't really a surprise: "Leave" and "Remain" had been polling neck-and-neck down to the wire, so the 52-48 result wasn't unlikely. But Trump, who led the Republican primary polls wire to wire, is clearly behind in the general-election polls. On the other hand, it's easy to see Trump and the Brexiteers as part of a wider movement: angry nativist populists, hostile to policy experts and welcoming to xenophobes and racists.  That movement won't meet with the same success everywhere, but it's real.

I want to move past the obvious similarities to look at two more important comparisons. Both the American and British situations feature 1) the country's major conservative party tearing itself apart, mostly because of 2) a long history of campaign promises that were never meant to be kept, because the people making them considered them impossible. Let's take these one at a time.

First of all, the Brexit is deeply tied to  a civil war inside the UK's Conservative Party. The "Remain" and "Leave" campaigns were led by rival Tory politicians: the Prime Minister, David Cameron, led the campaign to stay in the EU and Boris Johnson, who has long been gunning for Cameron's job, led the campaign to quit the EU. That would be bad enough, but it's worse: the leaders of BOTH campaigns have destroyed their political fortunes. Cameron resigned his Prime Ministership the day after losing the vote. Today, Boris Johnson turned his expected announcement of his campaign for Prime Minister into a surprise resignation speech. He won't be running for PM, and is resigning his seat. It's like House of Cards, but with lots of twists and drama.

The Brexit vote itself was meant to ward off Tory civil war, with Cameron throwing the referendum out as a sop to fend off both the anti-immigrant fourth or fifth party called the UK Indepence Party, and the Brexiteer faction of his Cameron's own party ... essentially to shut Boris Johnson up. So, that plan has gone as badly as it could go: UKIP and its loathsome chief, Nigel  Farage, have now been empowered, Cameron has lost his premiership, and Johnson has immediately fallen on the sword he used to decapitate Cameron. How did it go so wrong?

It went so wrong because the Brexit itself was a poison pill: easy to campaign for, but a disaster to put into practice. Once the Leave side had won, and Cameron had chosen to resign without triggering the exit (as opposed to triggering the exit and then resigning, which only a fool would have counted on him doing), Johnson and the other Leave leaders were stuck. The Prime Minister who actually triggers the Brexit, who begins the formal process of withdrawal, will be on the hook both for the bad effects that follow, especially the flight of business and banking from London to other European cities, and for the drawbacks of whatever deal the UK hammers out with the remaining European powers.

Here's the thing: Boris Johnson knows the consequences of the Brexit will be bad, and he knows that the deal with Europe won't deliver what he promised. London has become the financial capital of Europe under the current deal, and that becomes impossible if the UK leaves. An enormous amount of business WILL leave the UK, and take jobs with it. Meanwhile, the EU will never allow a country access to its market without both paying dues and (more importantly) allowing free immigration from the rest of the EU. Countries like Switzerland, which have side deals with the EU, have to allow free immigration, so the end to immigration that the Brexiteers promised will never happen without losing access to all that sweet tariff-free trade. BoJo knows these things.

But BoJo and the other Brexiteers publicly denied all of these things. They denounced the (true and totally common-sense) warnings that the Brexit would lose British jobs as "scaremongering." And BoJo began making noises after the vote about how the UK could stay part of the European market, etc. etc. etc. Except it can't without, you know, staying in. So Johnson, who has made his entire career on basking the EU, had no way forward. The backstabbing finale, in which Johnson's deputy from the Leave campaign put the knife to his prospects, was just the inevitable ending.

Johnson has been living for years off a popular (and populist) movement which he knows would be disastrous but which he didn't really think could succeed. It's very obviously that he had no plan for what to do when he won. He didn't plan for the Brexit because he never expected not necessarily even wanted it to happen. It was just a convenient set of talking points to rally a populist base against the party insiders, splitting populist Tories from the party's pro-business establishment, to advance BoJo's career. He was making a set of fairy tale promises.

Boris Johnson has campaigned for years, as both politician and journalist, on a "Let's All Go to Narnia" platform. It's not practical in any way, but it strikes a deep chord with voters and gets them passionately enthusiastic. Even better, it forces Boris's political opponents into the unenviable position of arguing against Narnia, and sounding like passionless, pedantic jerks. No one likes the Anti-Narnia guy. And Boris never had to worry about what he proposed coming true, because it was so far from being possible.

Then one day, Boris Johnson found himself hip-deep in snow, staring dumbfounded at a lamp post. What to do, but crawl back into your uncle's wardrobe and hide?

Here in America, we're seeing a parallel breakup of the Republican coalition, as its populist wing breaks away from its traditional business-oriented policies. Everything Trump promises the crowds would be catastrophic for American business. But the other Republicans aren't in much position to debunk Trump, because they have been cynically feeding Trump's own fairy-tale promises to their base for years now. Trump's border wall is not Trump's idea. Trump has no policy ideas of his own. The border wall with Mexico has been a fairy-tale proposal that various Republicans have hawked during primaries and off-year elections for years. (Sometimes they have called the wall a "security fence" in order to sound smarter, and make the totally unworkable proposal sound like something practical.) I've been hearing about that "build a wall" plan since at least the 90s. No one who made that promise ever had to worry about it happening. And if Trump actually won, he would quickly discover that building the wall would be ruinously expensive and pointless.

Here's the Republicans' real problem. They have a whole batch of fairy tale policies that they've been pushing to their voters for years now. (The Democrats also have some pie-in-the-sky plans that they don't think are achievable at the moment, but the actually think those things could work if put into place. And they have a habit of only campaigning on what they think they can get done in the next few years.) Clinton's policies are things she that she thinks could get through Congress and will work if they do.

"Repealing Obamacare" is a classic fairy-tale promise. It excites the Republican base like no one's business. But the Republicans also know that they can't actually do it, and that doing it would be a disaster. Throwing people off their health insurance is not something you do in office. Likewise, actually banning abortion would be the ruin of the party that does it for decades afterward. That doesn't stop them from campaigning on these fairy-tale promises. In fact, they campaign on them so hard because they know they can't make these things happen. But if they did, it would be a disaster. This is red meat you feed the rubes. The problem comes, not just for a political party but for a whole nation, when the rubes expect you to do what you've promised them.

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