Donald Trump Archives - Page 50 of 55

I was a political science major at the State University of New York at New Paltz in the 1970s, a fairly yeasty time of Vietnam, Watergate (I watched the hearings voraciously), and the first President (Gerald Ford) selected through the 25th Amendment, after Vice President Spiro Agnew, and later President Richard Nixon, left office.

I remember the sharp partisan divide. Yet I recall a strong sense of duty to the country, being greater than a duty to party, taking place, as the Republican members of the Senate committee investigating the break-in, and the House committee that was considering the impeachment of a Republican President, resolutely, though not without anguish.

The political climate in the United States in 2016 is awful. I understand why people hate politics and decide to ignore politics altogether.

These are things I believe about the current season:

The Hillary Clinton supporters who have been nagging the Bernie Sanders supporters to “get in line,” to give up the quest, were wrong. I’ve been saying for MONTHS to leave them alone, respect their views. Bernie has been signaling, for WEEKS, that he would eventually back Hillary Clinton.

But he was waiting. Waiting to get concessions on the Democratic party platform. He had what is called LEVERAGE. You do not give away leverage for “the sake of party unity,” but rather exploit it. What Bernie did was, frankly, brilliant.

Sarah Silverman telling Bernie supporters Monday night that they were “ridiculous” for continuing to support the Vermont senator was demeaning and unhelpful.

Likewise, those Bernie folks who screamed “WE trusted you” repeatedly at Senator Elizabeth Warren (MA) during her address Monday night, as though they were demanding some sort of ideological purity, were extremely rude.

I appreciate the debate about Who Should Bernie Voters Support Now? Robert Reich vs. Chris Hedges on Tackling the Neoliberal Order. One can disagree without being disagreeable, as my mother used to say.

I stole this from Elaine Lee on Facebook: “A primary campaign season is like a nasty divorce negotiation. Each side builds its case against the other, in an effort to paint the other as evil, in hopes of winning the house. Also like a divorce negotiation? It’s most important to think about the future of the kids.”

The Democrats were right to get rid of the party head Debbie Wasserman Schultz over bias toward Hillary. No, she’s not getting a cushy job with the Clinton campaign, but the optics, with novice supporters unfamiliar with the nomenclature, could have been a LOT better.

She’s referred to as Hillary because there was a previous President Clinton. I’m not feeling the sexism here. Her signs have a big H, not a big C.

The Democratic convention, for me, was easier to watch than the Republican one last week. The GOP version was a dystopian version of America that was, frankly, exhausting. I avoided watching the Hunger Games movies for a reason.

Voting for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, or Jill Stein, the Green Party standard-bearer, or writing in Bernie, or voting for no one, is NOT voting for Donald Trump. I so wish my Clinton friends would STOP SAYING THIS. It convinces no one, because it’s bad math. If there are 100 people, and 50 of them voted for Trump, and 50 of them voted for Clinton, if the 101st person votes for Stein, Trump and Clinton still each have 50 votes. The ASSUMPTION is that vote would otherwise go to Clinton, when there is no evidence of that.

After supporting Bernie Sanders in the primary, I am voting for Hillary Clinton in the general election, for several reasons, some having to do with my deep fear of a Donald Trump Presidency, but others having to do with the positive attributes laid out by Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, among others. Plus this cartoon. It helps – a lot – that Bernie requested that his supporters do so.

That said, I strongly favor people voting. Even for Trump, Lord help us. Or vote for Johnson or Stein. As I’ve noted, I fear a write-in vote would be less effective because state laws vary in how much they are counted.

But I VIGOROUSLY oppose people not voting at all. If you know the history of this country, and how difficult it has been for black people, and women, to exercise the franchise, you bring shame to America by staying home. (I could have soft-pedaled that a little… nah.)

I freely admit I don’t “get” Donald Trump’s appeal. At all. He appears, to me, singularly unfit for office, as historians such as David McCullough have indicated.

And he invited the Russians to hack into a former secretary of state’s email to help him win an election?

However, I do not believe that anyone who supports Donald Trump is necessarily a racist, or stupid, or whatever. I was, accidentally, the conduit, of such an attack, on my Facebook feed, with someone I know personally bashing the husband of a friend of mine. There were 17 or so comments back and forth, and frankly, I stopped looking.

Ad hominem attacks win over no one except those already inclined to believe that point of view. Fighting on FB about politics is the logical equivalent of eating glass. Maybe a little won’t tear your insides out, but I’m not looking to discover the threshold.

This is especially an issue because social media is the place most likely to view calumny, an offense against the truth, in the political discourse. “We become guilty of this offense against the truth when by remarks contrary to the truth, we harm the reputation of others and give occasion for false judgments concerning them.”

Anyway, there it is. I expect a lot of, “Well, I agree with some of what you say, except…”

P.S. Here is a 1992 cartoon by Paul Mavrides, which initially appeared in Heavy Metal magazine. It’s annoyingly accurate, still. Used with permission.

King Donald

Ted Cruz’s speech – including the absence of an explicit endorsement of Trump – was pre-cleared by both the RNC and Donald Trump.

Back in the 1980s, I had this working theory that Ronald Reaagan should not be President, that the day-to-day details were not in keeping with his personality. But I DID think there was a job for him: King.

Reagan could travel around like the actor he was, telling us it’s “morning in America,” while someone like Walter Mondale, who Reagan defeated in the 1984 election, would do the hands-on stuff.

I was reminded of this when I read this story about Donald Trump, originally in the New York Times:

One day this past May, Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., reached out to a senior adviser to Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, who left the presidential race just a few weeks before. As a candidate, Kasich declared in March that Trump was “really not prepared to be president of the United States,” and the following month he took the highly unusual step of coordinating with his rival Senator Ted Cruz in an effort to deny Trump the nomination. But according to the Kasich adviser (who spoke only under the condition that he not be named), Donald Jr. wanted to make him an offer nonetheless: Did he have any interest in being the most powerful vice president in history?

When Kasich’s adviser asked how this would be the case, Donald Jr. explained that his father’s vice president would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy.

Then what, the adviser asked, would Trump be in charge of?

“Making America great again” was the casual reply.

I started thinking that maybe there WAS a place for King Donald in the process. I had been hearing for nearly a year that he was genuinely surprised by how well he was doing politically. All that detailed stuff such as coming up with coherent policy positions, or even sharing his tax returns are beneath him. He’s a Big Picture kind of guy.

But he doesn’t really fit into a Reaganesque mold as monarch. He enjoys the humiliation too much: Little Mario, Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ Ted, and other names more suited for a playground bully.

From RedState, July 20:

The stupid pledge that Trump fans are on about… was meaningless. Why? Because Donald Trump voided it. Donald Trump refused it. Then Donald Trump spit on it by spitting on Ted Cruz’s family. On his wife. On his father. Pledge? Really?

How could you respect him if he endorsed because of some pledge that Trump himself in no way took seriously? After all that transpired in the primary? Even Trump didn’t care about the dumb pledge.

There are bridges too far. It’s not a difficult concept…

Well, buddy, Donald Trump crossed this pledge’s boundary…to become null and void. It was null and void when Trump wouldn’t agree to it. Without everyone then it doesn’t apply to anyone. It was null and void when he mocked Ted’s wife. It was null and void when he claimed repeatedly that Cruz was a false Christian. It was null and void when Trump accused his dad of conspiring to kill President Kennedy.

Trump is very good at trying to cast doubts on other candidates’ religion, though he was outraged when the pontiff questioned his.

And he played the Ted Cruz speech Wednesday night perfectly, making Cruz the villain and himself the victim.

From RedState, July 21:
Let’s be clear about something…: Cruz’s speech – including the absence of an explicit endorsement of Trump – was pre-cleared by both the RNC and Trump. His speech, including the non-endorsement of Trump, was not a surprise to the RNC or Trump in any way. Even Donald Trump himself admitted this on Twitter, and for once Trump’s Twitter is not full of crap… He said he would congratulate Donald Trump, would avoid saying anything negative about Trump, and talk about the principles he stood for. The RNC and Trump both agreed to let him proceed with the speech as is. So the idea that Cruz sprung this on them as some sort of surprise is absolute BS.

Another piece of BS that has been circulated by the RNC to throw dirt on Ted Cruz is that he gave different remarks on stage than the prepared ones he submitted to the RNC for review. Unfortunately, the RNC screwed themselves on this score by sending to media organization prepared copies of Ted Cruz remarks which show that Cruz said exactly what his prepared remarks indicated.

In fact, in response to the news that Cruz was going to make a speech that did not explicitly endorse him, Trump intentionally chose to escalate the situation by leaking the news to friendly delegations and instructing them to boo Cruz to make this a bigger deal than it otherwise would have been. If Trump’s delegates had not booed and caused a ruckus, but instead had remained silent or applauded at Cruz’s exhortation to vote for down-ticket races, everyone today would be talking about Pence and his speech, and the discussion would be about positive things associated with Trump and Pence and how they are going to move forward after the convention to at least possible victory.

But that is not what Trump’s supporters are interested in. They are interested in having a constant object of hatred and scorn… This is the driving force behind their support for Trump, principles be damned. Trump knows it too, which is why he was perfectly happy to let Ted Cruz go on stage, as long as the signal was clearly sent to his supporters that Ted Cruz is supposed to be the new object of hate.

Trump’s supporters really and truly don’t understand how well he constantly plays them. He treats them exactly like he treats his reality TV audience, and he knows that the successful ingredient to any “reality” TV show is the character who everyone loves to hate… “Reality” TV understands that nothing keeps viewers coming back like someone they want to see get “kicked off,” preferably in some humiliating fashion.

And now Trump is reportedly launching super-PACs to attack Cruz and Kasich for failing to support him at the convention. This is petty, vindictive, and a waste of money.

I actually watched the first night of the Republican National Convention – I asked for prayers on Facebook – but just couldn’t get through anything but the summaries of the last three evenings. Still, I continue to believe that
Donald Trump will win in November against Hillary Clinton, despite, or maybe because of, his bigotry.

Expect that Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana, will be a major player in the Trump administration, due to their shared “Grandiosity and Misogyny.”

And speaking of misogyny, some of the digs at Melania Trump over her Monday night RNC speech, such as this one from Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, was OK. But a lot of the comments directed towards her were distressing and embarrassingly wrong.

At least, on Thursday night, Donald Trump succeeded in delivering a speech NO ONE will want to plagiarize, it was so dark and dreary. The same is true of many of his surrogates, notably Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie.

The slogan “make America great again” is pure Reagan, even if it’s code for going back to more exclusionary times. But how can he do the King Donald thing, being such a malevolent downer?

Yet, if history is useful, mere calls for unity are not enough. The Washington Post noted: “He, until now a Republican problem, this week became a challenge the nation must confront and overcome. The real estate tycoon is uniquely unqualified to serve as president, in experience and temperament. He is mounting a campaign of snarl and sneer, not substance. To the extent he has views, they are wrong in their diagnosis of America’s problems and dangerous in their proposed solutions. Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration and division could strain the bonds that have held a diverse nation together. His contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew…”

As Sojourner notes, God Has Not Given Us a Spirit of Fear. “How DO We Lift Up Love Over Hate in This Angry Election Season?”

July rambling #1: Equality Feels Like Oppression

Smokey Robinson, a Leader of ‘a Musical Revolution,’ to Receive Gershwin Prize

Refugees Encounter a Foreign Word: Welcome

‘When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression’

Whiteness.

Medicalization and its Discontents

Expats and accents

N.J. forces mom to pay son’s student loans: Murder ‘does not meet the threshold for loan forgiveness’

Noel Neill, R.I.P.

Stephen Colbert Fondly Recall the Moment He Knew His Wife Was the One

Now I Know: The Friendliest of Fire and A (Stuart) Little Discovery and A Whale of a Discovery and A Run on the Runs

Stars and Stripes

Are we overdoing the Founding Fathers?

Three-part series of American Revolution-themed Sesame Street sketches from 1986/1987.

‘Is Lady Liberty a man?’: Fox worries France ‘pulled a fast one’ with transgender Statue of Liberty

Hanging Clothes

Trouble With Comics: Nationalism and the comics

How Justice Scalia’s Absence Has Affected the Supreme Court’s Decision

Racism In My Front Yard

The Negro Motorist Green Book and Black America’s Perpetual Search For A Home; Yes, I wrote about this here

Real Time with Bill Maher: How “Trickle Down” economics has never worked

Fun facts: Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) is chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. His father, John A. Chaffetz, was previously married to Katherine (Kitty) Dickson, and they had one son, John. Later, John Sr. married Jason’s mother, Margaret A. Wood. Kitty subsequently married Michael Dukakis (D-MA), the now-former governor. Jason worked on Michael Dukakis’ 1988 Presidential campaign.

DJT

The Vast Left-Wing Media Conspiracy to Make Donald Trump Look Like a Bigot

Donald Trump is shattering taboos around race, causing alarm among those who track racial tension and galvanizing white supremacists

WHO ARE ALL THESE TRUMP SUPPORTERS? At the candidate’s rallies, a new understanding of America emerges.

The Theology of Donald Trump

Just What Were Donald Trump’s Ties to the Mob?

How voters’ personal suffering overtook reason

Donald Trump and the Jews, explained

An old episode of Sesame Street featuring a Muppet named Ronald Grump who is proposing building a condo tower called Grump Tower. Throughout the show (0:00, 10:52, 21:27, 28:18 and 51:23). Plus ‘Sesame Street’ Parodied Donald Trump As A Garbage Grouch

MUSIC

Let’s Make America Great Again

Neil Sedaka – The Immigrant (re John Lennon)

30 Years- Roan Yellowthorne a/k/a Jackie McLean, who Remembers Her Childhood as Don McLean’s Daughter

US. Navy Band Sailors – “Jersey Boys” Medley (2014)

DakhaBrakha: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

17 COVER SONGS BETTER THAN THE ORIGINALS

Ten iconic TV opening theme songs

Donny & Marie Do Steely Dan

Smokey Robinson, a Leader of ‘a Musical Revolution,’ to Receive Gershwin Prize

Animated interview with Bob Dylan, age 20

Paul Simon Talks Peace with His Holiness the Dalai Lama (2005)

The Spice Girls at 20: ‘Women weren’t allowed to be like that in public’

For President

As someone who wrote in Gene McCarthy in 1976, I have experience in throwing away my vote.

Someone linked to this article suggesting “the latest Electoral College prediction should have the Trump campaign panicking” about his chance of becoming President.

Moreover, this outcome meant he is himself being lowered onto his own personal kryptonite: Loserdom. This article was met with great glee, and when I didn’t share in the enthusiasm, I was told I didn’t “get” the article. Oh, I “got” it, but I think it’s not such great news.

For one thing, the surveys are not ‘predicting’ who will win the Presidency. So an 80 percent shot doesn’t mean Clinton is a sure thing. It’s a reflection of a point in time, before conventions, before the Vice-Presidential picks.

Another issue I have is that taunting Trump as a “loser” is a low road that won’t stick in any case, so it doesn’t matter. He eschews polls that are unfavorable, dismissing their reliability, or noting that it’s still early in the general election campaign, and if I were him, I’d do the same. Some of you will recall that in the summer of 1988, former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis was up by 17 points against George H.W. Bush, and he lost badly.

Also, I fear a big Clinton lead this early would suggest that voters can feel cocky, free to vote for someone else as a protest vote. We saw a variation on how well that turned out in the UK.

In both 2012 and 2016, Gary Johnson, former New Mexico governor, is the Libertarian Party standard-bearer, and Jill Stein is the Green Party candidate. It seems almost inevitable that, with Clinton and Trump’s high unfavorables, both of them will do significantly better this year.

Red State’s Caleb Howe wrote this recently:

When it comes down to it, when it comes to the Supreme Court appointment, when it comes down to the message we send, when it comes down finally to where to put your faith when you’re standing in the voting booth in November, I can only see myself voting for Gary Johnson.

#NeverTrump. #NeverHillary. #AlwaysLiberty

It is not simply a matter of not voting for Trump or Hillary… I’m voting for Gary Johnson. Because I believe he’ll strive for more liberty, less government, a good Supreme Court, and because the GOP and the DNC can’t be trusted to do any of those things.

Similarly, there are disaffected Bernie Sanders voters who absolutely WILL NOT vote for Hillary for President. Jill Stein is a logical alternative.

In fact, I recently tried to get a college student to do just that. As someone who wrote in Gene McCarthy in 1976, I have experience in throwing away my vote. This young woman says she’s going to write in Bernie Sanders because she felt “disenfranchised” by New York’s arcane election laws that did not allow her, as a voter not declared to either major party, to vote for him back in the April 19 primary.

My resistance to her position is less philosophical than practical. As someone who worked the elections in the mid-1970s as a poll worker, I worry that a write-in vote won’t be counted as a Bernie vote at all, at least in New York. l. In general, unless there is a large number of write-ins approaching a contending total, boards of elections don’t generally differentiate the Sanders votes from those for Peter Pan or Bullwinkle the Moose.

If I were her, #NeverHillary, who will not be bullied into voting for Hillary – and the bullies ARE assuredly out there – I’d consider voting for someone like Jill Stein for President, whose votes would be reported, as a candidate for a party on the ballot in most states. Better Stein than voting for Trump, who I personally find to be an existential threat.

I think, arithmetically, a vote for Stein, or Johnson is NOT a vote for Trump. It’s not exactly like voting for no one for President, because it will point out the dissatisfaction with the system. I think not voting at all doesn’t show protest, but rather apathy. As someone who literally had to argue to be able to register to vote early on, I do not appreciate staying home on Election Day.

Both Clinton and Trump are perceived more negatively than a third- or fourth-party candidate might sway the outcome in certain states. Does former NM governor Johnson take enough votes to alter the outcome in his home state? Will Stein, from neighboring Massachusetts, peel away enough Democrats and independents to give New York to homeboy Trump? I doubt it, but nothing in this election cycle will surprise me anymore, including Trump taking off his mask and admitting that it was all a ruse.

This will please some, and severely disappoint others, but I decided to vote for whomever the Democratic nominee for President will be this November. Barring an indictment, I assume that’ll be Hillary Clinton. (And if she’s not the nominee, then whomever: Bernie, who I voted for in the primary; Joe Biden, which would be a 1968 Hubert Humphrey pick…) There are some positive reasons, which I will lay out as the election nears, but it’s also for a lot of negative reasons. Presently, HRC has the best chance of stopping Trump, and a third-party vote in a close state could lead to a bad outcome.

Yes, the system was almost certainly rigged in Florida in 2000, but the results of Ralph Nader’s candidacy for President in the Sunshine State gave the crooks cover to purloin the election for W. I say this as someone who voted for Ralph in both 1996 and 2000 in “safe” New York. I’m just less convinced that any state is “safe” this cycle.

I’m also likely voting for the former secretary of state in direct response to the rampant sexism she’s endured. A recent example is a similar outfit she was wearing with Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) recently. Guys on the stage are wearing the same, or similar, suits, but that is not worthy of comment. Also, picking Warren as her VP has been criticized as too gendery.

Trump’s shortlist includes the former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA), who has the same marital track record as DJT, and Chris Christie (R-NJ), seen as Trump’s lapdog.