Having taken a week off from the Sift, you’d think I’d have a bunch of great stuff ready to go. Well, not exactly: Since I last posted, I’ve spoken in two churches 1200 miles apart — here’s what I said — and spent the week in between driving across the country and nursing a cold that is still not completely gone. So stuff will come out slowly this morning.
The big things I want to cover are sexual harassment and abuse (because that’s what everybody has been talking about) and the looming end of net neutrality (because more people should be talking about it). In each case, I want us to have a larger focus: Sexual misbehavior in politics isn’t just Roy Moore and Al Franken; it’s probably hundreds of people we don’t know about yet. We need to think this through in general, not just respond based on the way we feel about those currently in the spotlight.
And net neutrality isn’t just some nerdish issue about the internet. It’s part of the major economic trend of the last forty years, which has played a big role in increasing economic inequality: Under the guise of “freedom”, the United States has chopped down regulations that limit the power of middlemen to insert themselves between producers and consumers. The result is an economy whose fruits go not to the productive, but to those who own choke-points where tolls can be charged.
Until now, government regulations have forced your internet service provider to be a relatively passive participant in all your online adventures. But if net neutrality goes away, your ISP will be “free” to fence you in, and to charge tolls to any online service that wants access to you. That set-up will be immensely profitable, but not at all productive.
Anyway, probably one of those topics will be in a separate post and the other will get incorporated into the weekly summary; I still haven’t decided which is which. When any of it will actually appear is anybody’s guess.
One side note: My previous experience of blogging while slightly feverish is that the number of typos goes way up. If you point them out in the comments I’ll fix them.
This week everybody was talking about the Democrats’ wins
(Well, except Fox News. Elections? Were there elections Tuesday?) The big race was Ralph Northam beating Ed Gillespie for the governorship in Virginia, which I discuss in one of the featured posts.
But it wasn’t just the governor’s race: Democrats took the other major statewide offices and gained substantially in the Virginia House of Delegates, making it close enough that control depends on recounts. But it’s a measure of the power of gerrymandering that the seats split almost evenly, despite the total Democratic vote crushing the total Republican vote 53%-44%. Anyone who believes in democracy has to be deeply disturbed that 44% of the vote might be enough for Republicans to maintain control.
And it wasn’t just Virginia: Democrat Phil Murphy replaced Chris Christie as governor of New Jersey, beating Christie’s lieutenant governor 56%-42%. By a wide margin, Maine voted to expand Medicaid.
and Roy Moore
I talked about this in the other featured post. In particular, adult men pursuing girls in their mid-teens isn’t just a quirk of Roy Moore. It’s something that happens in an extremely conservative Christian subculture.
One thing I didn’t put into that article: I’m not the least bit shocked that there’s something icky in Moore’s past. When you style yourself as “the Ten Commandments Judge“, you’re compensating for something. Most Christians don’t need to install 5000-pound granite monuments to prove how upright they are.
and Veterans Day
As I watched all the ways veterans were honored this weekend, it reinforced my impression that America has a strangely bifurcated relationship with its military. On the one hand, military service has never been more distant from the lives of most Americans. Soldiers serve and are in danger all over the globe, in places (like Niger) that most of us couldn’t find on a map. We fight wars (like Iraq or Afghanistan) without any of the impacts on everyday life that previous generations took for granted: no rationing, no tax increases, no products missing from the shelves. If you didn’t follow the news you might not even know it was happening.
Simultaneously, we also mythologize our military and its personnel more than I can ever remember. At sporting events, we have them stand up to be applauded. We stick pro-military slogans to our bumpers. Those who don’t stand for the national anthem are condemned not for disrespecting our country, but for disrespecting our veterans. Politicians constantly tell us our soldiers are the best in the world, or the best among us.
And yet again, we only sort of care whether they’re treated right. It’s a scandal from time to time how badly the VA takes care of their medical needs, but it goes away, and most of us don’t bother to find out whether anything was done. When our attention is drawn to veterans issues, we demand the best for them. But we don’t follow through. We’re embarrassed when we realize that we haven’t done well by them, but we don’t really care.
and tax reform
The Senate came out with its tax-reform bill, which differs from the House bill in a number of ways, but keeps many of the features that make it a bonanza for rich people: big cuts in corporate taxes, getting rid of the alternative minimum tax, and cutting taxes on income from pass-through business entities (such as most of Donald Trump’s investments). (One report says that the rich don’t get the biggest cuts in percentage terms, but they’re not taking into account where the business tax breaks end up.) Like the House bill, it adds $1.5 trillion to the national debt over ten years. It differs mainly in which deductions it preserves or eliminates, but that’s barely worth talking about for one big reason: This still isn’t the bill they intend to pass.
Senate Finance Committee aides said they planned to make adjustments to the legislation because it probably does not comply with the rules for a special Senate procedure they hope to use to pass the bill with 50 votes, rather than the 60 votes typically needed to beat a filibuster.
The big problem is that it will continue increasing the deficit after ten years, which reconciliation rules don’t allow. This isn’t just a frill that can be cut away without affecting the big picture; it comes from the revenue cuts that are what the bill is all about. So fixing it will require a lot more than mere “adjustments”.
So this is where we are: The plan is still for the House to pass its bill by Thanksgiving, and for the House and Senate to agree on something they can deliver to Trump’s desk by Christmas. But they still haven’t told us what that will be, and both the House and the Senate know that the bill they are currently discussing can’t be it. In other words, it’s all still playing out like I predicted two weeks ago.
Tuesday, on a phone conference with 12 Democratic senators, Trump made this outrageous claim:
My accountant called me and said “you’re going to get killed in this bill”.
Not only is there not much in this bill that would presumably hurt the president, but it kind of seems like it’s specifically designed to help him.
Of course, Trump could lay this debate to rest by releasing his tax returns, which (unlike every president since Nixon) he refuses to do. In the one year where we have some Trump tax information (2005), Trump paid $38 million in taxes on $150 million in income, about 25%. But $31 million of that total was due to the alternative minimum tax (AMT), which current proposals eliminate. Without the AMT, he would have paid less than 5%.
but Trump’s Russia comments are very disturbing
Saturday, Trump called former leaders of America’s intelligence agencies (James Clapper, John Brennan, and James Comey) “political hacks”, and insisted that he believes Vladimir Putin’s assurances that he didn’t meddle in the 2016 U.S. elections. The whole controversy, he claimed, “was set up by Democrats.”
Former Bush speechwriter David Frum commented that although we don’t yet have proof that Trump conspired with the Russian interference at the time,
What is becoming ever-more undeniable is Trump’s complicity in the attack after the fact—and his willingness to smash the intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies in order to protect Putin, Russia, and evidently himself. …
A year after the 2016 election, the Trump administration has done nothing to harden U.S. election systems against future interference. It refuses to implement the sanctions voted by Congress to punish Russia for election meddling. The president fired the director of the FBI, confessedly to halt an investigation into Russia’s actions—and his allies in Congress and the media malign the special counsel appointed to continue the investigation.
These are not the actions of an innocent man, however vain, stubborn, or uniformed.
“Beyond a reasonable doubt” is the standard for criminal justice. It’s not the standard for counter-intelligence determinations. The preponderance of the evidence ever-more clearly indicates: In ways we cannot yet fully reckon—but can no longer safely deny—the man in the Oval Office has a guilty connection to the Russian government. That connection would bar him from literally any other job in national security except that of head of the executive branch and commander- in-chief of the armed forces of the United States.
There’s nothing ‘America First’ about taking the word of a KGB colonel over that of the American intelligence community. There’s no ‘principled realism’ in cooperating with Russia to prop up the murderous Assad regime, which remains the greatest obstacle to a political solution that would bring an end to the bloodshed in Syria. Vladimir Putin does not have America’s interests at heart. To believe otherwise is not only naive but also places our national security at risk.
Demonstrators with faces covered chanted “Pure Poland, white Poland!” and “Refugees get out!”. A banner hung over a bridge that read: “Pray for Islamic Holocaust.”
In the Roy Moore post I mentioned Jim Ziegler invoking Joseph and Mary to justify an adult man’s pursuit of a teen-age girl. But that wasn’t the week’s worst piece of theology: Rev. Hans Fiene of River of Life Lutheran Church in Channahon, Illinois (part of the Missouri Synod that I was raised in) takes that prize for this observation about the Sutherland Springs church shooting.
For those with little understanding of and less regard for the Christian faith, there may be no greater image of prayer’s futility than Christians being gunned down mid-supplication. But for those familiar with the Bible’s promises concerning prayer and violence, nothing could be further from the truth. When those saints of First Baptist Church were murdered yesterday, God wasn’t ignoring their prayers. He was answering them.
You see, when Christians ask God to “deliver us from evil” in the Lord’s Prayer, they are asking to be delivered from evil not just in the here and now, but eternally.
So when a madman with a rifle sought to persecute the faithful at First Baptist Church on Sunday morning, he failed. Just like those who put Christ to death, and just like those who have brought violence to believers in every generation, this man only succeeded in being the means through which God delivered his children from this evil world into an eternity of righteousness and peace.
So remember that, the next time a minister asks you to join in reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Unless you’re prepared for gunmen to burst through the doors and mow down your whole family, you might want to opt out.
Fiene’s essay is based on the romantic view of persecution that causes so many Christians to imagine they are being persecuted for their religion when they’re really not. The Sutherland Springs Baptists suffered exactly the same persecution as Sikhs in Wisconsin, country music fans in Las Vegas, and gay night-clubbers in Orlando: the persecution that we all risk by living in a gun-crazy society.
American Christians, who dominate this country only a little less completely than they used to, indulge in persecution fantasies the way that teen-agers safe in their parents’ basements indulge in horror movies. Someone might try to force me to sell a gay couple the same cake I would sell a straight couple! Or to provide health insurance for my employees! It’s just exactly like the stoning of Stephen, or facing the lions in Rome.
Oh, crap. We’re losing Louis C. K. to the rolling sexual abuse scandal. At least he owned up to the accusations, rather than trying to convince us that his accusers are lying. But we’ve got to stop tolerating this kind of stuff.
By now you know the basics: Thursday, the Republican senate candidate in Alabama got accused of drawing a 14-year-old girl into a sexual encounter when he was 32, back in 1979. As Josh Moon of Alabama Political Reporter put it:
For nearly 40-year-old allegations, the Post’s story was about as solid as it could be.
In other words: We’re not talking about rumors-backed-by-anonymous-sources. The Washington Postarticle that broke the story names and quotes the 14-year-old (Leigh Corfman, now 53). Three other women (also named) tell similar, if less extreme, stories about Moore:
Moore pursued them when they were between the ages of 16 and 18 and he was in his early 30s, episodes they say they found flattering at the time, but troubling as they got older.
The Post found these women; they didn’t come forward on their own. (The one detail I’d still like to hear is how the reporters found the women.)
Neither Corfman nor any of the other women sought out The Post. While reporting a story in Alabama about supporters of Moore’s Senate campaign, a Post reporter heard that Moore allegedly had sought relationships with teenage girls. Over the ensuing three weeks, two Post reporters contacted and interviewed the four women. All were initially reluctant to speak publicly but chose to do so after multiple interviews, saying they thought it was important for people to know about their interactions with Moore. The women say they don’t know one another.
Other details are corroborated: Corfman’s mother remembers the incident where her daughter met Moore, and recalls Corfman telling her about Moore’s advances in the 1990s, when they saw his picture in a newspaper. (Moore says he never met her.) Two of Corfman’s childhood friends (one of them named, the other anonymous) remember her talking about an older man at the time, and the named one recalls Corfman saying Moore’s name.
After the story came out, CNN found more corroboration from Teresa Jones, who was a deputy district attorney working in the same office as Moore at the time:
It was common knowledge that Roy dated high-school girls. Everyone we knew thought it was weird. We wondered why anyone his age would hang out at high school football games and the mall.
In other words, if the story is a smear, it would have to be a fairly large conspiracy, and there’s no way the Post’s reporters aren’t in on it. Is that really the most likely explanation?
Moore has called the accusations “outlandish“, “garbage”, and “politically motivated”, and he says he’ll sue the Post. (I’ll bet we never see that suit.) But there’s something a little off in his denials. In an interview with Sean Hannity, who surely was not trying to trip him up, he claims not to remember Corfman (“I never knew this woman.”), though he does remember two of the women who claimed he approached them when they were teens. (He “generally” didn’t date teen girls, he says.) He doesn’t remember going out on dates with them, or giving one of them alcohol even though she was under the drinking age (as she reports). He did date “a lot of young ladies” at that point in his life, but he doesn’t remember having a girlfriend in her late teens, and “I don’t remember ever dating any girl without the permission of her mother”.
I would guess that most 30-something men don’t remember dating any girl who needed the permission of her mother. But that phrase is suggestive of something else, as I’ll discuss in a few paragraphs.
The political situation. Moore is running in a special election for the remainder of Jeff Sessions’ term in the Senate, which lasts until 2020. The election will be held December 12. It’s already too late to replace Moore’s name on the ballot, though write-ins are possible. However, it’s hard to imagine a Republican write-in candidate succeeding without Moore stepping aside.
Other options are described in the NYT: The governor could delay the special election, which she says she won’t do. If Moore wins, the Senate could refuse to seat him. The Constitution addresses this possibility:
Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members … Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.
Ironically, Moore quoted this same passage in 2006 as part of an argument that the House should not seat Rep. Keith Ellison because he’s a Muslim. In Moore’s case, two-thirds would mean all 48 Democratic senators and 19 of the 52 Republicans. Expulsion would set up another special-election situation.
Before the story broke, the RCP polling average on this race had Moore ahead of Democrat Doug Jones by 6 points, with one poll putting the margin at 11. I had been thinking that the polls understated Moore’s lead, because the Raven Republicans (“never Moore”) probably would have come around the same way most never-Trump Republicans did.
Maybe they still will, but there appears to be an initial reaction to the story: A Thursday-to-Saturday poll had Democrat Doug Jones ahead of Moore 46%-42%, or 48%-44% when Undecideds were pushed to make a choice. Another poll, however, shows Moore’s lead shrinking, but still at 10%.
Defense in depth. National Republicans are either partially or totally against Moore. The safe line is Mitch McConnell’s: Moore should get out of the race “if these allegations are true”. But a few national figures have gone further: John McCain left out the “if” and just said “He should immediately step aside.” Mitt Romney was even blunter:
Innocent until proven guilty is for criminal convictions, not elections. I believe Leigh Corfman. Her account is too serious to ignore. Moore is unfit for office and should step aside.
But a number of Alabama Republicans have rallied around Moore. Many are simply repeating his charge that the whole thing is a political smear. A number of them, though, have gone further: Even if the allegations are true, they’re just not that bad, or at least not bad enough to allow another Democrat into the Senate.
State Auditor Jim Ziegler offered this as evidence that Moore’s intentions were honorable: He eventually married “one of the younger women”. Moore’s wife was 24 when he married her at age 38. (I had a similar thought — that Moore’s choice of wife proves that he has an eye for younger women — but I wasn’t planning to go there until I heard Ziegler do it.) Also, Joseph was much older than Mary when they married and raised Jesus. (If the sheer absurdity of this doesn’t faze him, I wonder why he doesn’t make an even stronger claim: Think how much older God was when He got Mary pregnant.)
The religious divide is bigger than you think. In general, American Christians tend to picture extreme Christians as like themselves, only moreso: They attend church more often, take the Bible more literally, are more offended by sinful behavior, and so forth. But the Moore controversy is uncovering a conservative Christian subculture that is totally outside the mainstream.
In particular, the claim that there’s nothing wrong with 30-something men pursuing just-out-of-puberty girls is related to a “traditional” view of marriage that most American Christians would find repellent: A 14-year-old girl isn’t going to be an equal partner with a 32-year-old man; but if a wife’s only purpose is to obey her husband and have a lot of babies, she can do that as well an adult woman. Maybe better.
That’s not middle-of-the-road Christianity only moreso, it’s a whole other worldview. Writing for The L.A. Times, Kathryn Brightbill describes growing up within that world, where Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson (whose son Willie spoke at the Republican Convention) advocates marrying 15-year-old girls. (His own wife was 16, and he started dating her when she was 14.) And speakers at conventions for Christian home-schoolers both advocated an exemplified such marriages.
We need to talk about the segment of American culture that probably doesn’t think the allegations against Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore are particularly damning, the segment that will blanch at only two accusations in the Washington Post expose: He pursued a 14-year-old-girl without first getting her parents’ permission, and he initiated sexual contact outside of marriage.
If anything bad happens, of course, it is the girl’s own fault.
Much of the sexual abuse that takes place in Independent Fundamentalist Baptist, or IFB, churches involves adult men targeting 14- to 16-year-old girls. If caught, the teenage victim may be forced to repent the “sin” of having seduced an adult man. Former IFB megachurch pastor Jack Schaap argued that he should be released from prison after being convicted of molesting a 16-year-old girl, asserting that the “aggressiveness” of his victim “inhibited [his] impulse control.”
Nancy French relates similar experiences in The Washington Post.
I was delighted when the preacher volunteered to drop me off. As we drove, I chatted incessantly, happy to have him all to myself without people trying to get his attention in the church parking lot. When we got to my house, I was shocked that he walked me inside my dark house, even more surprised when he lingered in conversation, and thunderstruck when he kissed me right on the lips.
At 12 years old, I swooned over my good luck. He picked me out of all the girls at church. But the relationship, especially after he moved on, reset my moral compass. If all the church conversation about morality and sexual purity was a lie, what else was fake? Now that the “family of God” felt incestuous, I rejected the church and myself. Didn’t I want the preacher’s attention? Didn’t I cause this?
What this is all going to turn on is whether Alabama’s Christians, even those inclined to vote Republican, take a hard look at Roy Moore’s version of Christianity, and realize that they have very little in common with it. Ross Douthat might be a model:
One lesson is that any social order that vests particular forms of power in men needs to do more, not less, to hold the male of the species accountable.
Some cultural conservatives, in evangelical Christianity especially, combine a belief in male headship in churches and families with a “boys will be boys and girls shouldn’t tempt them” attitude toward sex. It’s a combination that’s self-contradictory and deeply toxic, handing men not just power but a permission slip to abuse it — which, predictably, they do.
For weeks on this blog, I’d been fretting about the Virginia governor’s race. If we were really in the midst of a Democratic surge that might turn 2018 into a wave election, Virginia shouldn’t have been this tense. Hillary had won there last year (by 5%, aided by a Virginian VP) and Democrats already held the governorship (thanks to Terry McAuliffe’s 2.6% win in 2013). Maybe that didn’t point to a landslide, but surely we couldn’t lose.
If he pulled off the upset, Gillespie’s campaign seemed likely to become a model for Republican candidates to keep on Trumping in 2018: Count on fear and race-baiting to bring the base out to vote, and hope Democrats stay home.
It didn’t work out that way. Northam won by 9%. That’s a big enough win to keep the 2018-wave narrative intact: Northam didn’t just repeat Hillary’s showing, he nearly doubled her margin, and more than tripled McAuliffe’s.
But beyond the horse-race aspect, what did we learn?
White identity politics isn’t enough. The clearest lesson is for Republicans: In 2016, Trumpism had two pieces, not just one. Yes, white Christian identity politics was a big chunk of it, but economic populism was another big chunk.
Health care bills he endorsed would cut billions in Medicaid funding over the years, his tax plan is a bonanza for the wealthy, the budget the GOP passed to facilitate that tax plan cuts Medicare by billions, and Trump’s own budget proposal included billions in Social Security cuts.
Mr. Trump projected an air of deference to China that was almost unheard-of for a visiting American president. Far from attacking Mr. Xi on trade, Mr. Trump saluted him for leading a country that he said had left the United States “so far behind.” He said he could not blame the Chinese for taking advantage of weak American trade policy.
This is, in part, a consequence of his saber-rattling against North Korea: He needs China’s cooperation there, so he’ll have to give in to them on trade.
And Mexico? Let’s just say that they’re not paying for the Wall. Renegotiating NAFTA is proving to be a lot more difficult than just “getting tough” and making bigger demands. If the agreement winds up getting scrapped, the big loser will be American farmers and precisely those rural communities that were counting on Trump for help.
Given that Trump himself has abandoned economic populism, the only “Trumpism” left for Gillespie to adopt was the white Christian identity part. And while that stuff is really powerful for some Americans, those people aren’t a majority. Not in Virginia and not in America as a whole.
I’m not sure how Republicans running in 2018 can deal with this problem. What the Republican majority in Congress has been all about (with Trump’s blessing, for the most part) is traditional Republican trickle-down economics. 2016 Trumpism was unified by an I’m-going-to-protect-you theme, protecting his voters on the one hand from a future where white Christians are a minority, and on the other from a convergence of foreign competition, corporations who have no loyalty to their workers, and economic trends moving against them. A 2018 of message of “I protected you from Mexicans and Muslims and transgender people in your bathroom, but I tried to take away your health insurance and gave your boss a big tax cut” doesn’t hang together nearly as well.
Unity, calmness, confidence. On the Democratic side, the lesson is fuzzier, but I think there’s still something to learn.
The progressive/centrist split in the national party tried to project itself onto the primary, but it never really took. Superficially, the Bernie-backed progressive (Tom Perrillo) lost to the establishment candidate (Northam), but the divide between them was never that large, and Perrillo supported Northam in the general election seemingly without reservations. Northam, in turn, endorsed a number of progressive causes: $15 minimum wage, free community college, restoring voting rights to felons who have served their time, and Medicaid expansion.
Northam took advantage of his comforting image as a pediatrician, and talked calmly about jobs, healthcare, and education. He appealed to traditional Virginia gentility, saying of Trump “We’re not letting him bring his hate into Virginia.”, and (on just about every issue) talking about all Virginians working together to find solutions. That, of course, is a traditional political bromide, but it contrasts nicely with scare-mongering about immigrants.
In part, Northam did that because he had to — it’s hard to picture him shouting and rabble-rousing. But I wonder if that isn’t the right approach: progressive positions on issues, expressed calmly in terms of traditional American values like justice and fairness, rather than in a way that makes them sound radical. Northam’s manner projected confidence that our problems are solvable if we work together — and not solvable if we let people take advantage of our worst instincts and turn us against each other.
Whatever approach Democratic candidates take in 2018, it needs to take advantage of the hole in the Republican message: The vague economic populism of 2016 was a mirage. Republicans have been telling white Christians who to blame for their problems, but not offering viable solutions.
Where it shows up, and where it doesn’t. The exit polls can be sliced and diced all sorts of ways, but here’s what jumped out at me: Gillespie slightly exceeded Trump’s totals among low-income households (under $50K annually) and high-income households (over $100K), but Northam clobbered him among middle-income households. In the $50-$100K bracket, Trump edged Clinton 49%-47% in 2016, but Northam beat Gillespie 57%-41% Tuesday. That’s what turned an overall 5% Clinton margin into a 9% Northam margin.
So I went back and looked at the 2013 exit polls: The Republican candidate won the $50K-$99K households 51%-43%, almost the exact mirror image of the 2017 result. So maybe this is a trend.
I could imagine a lot of reasons: Maybe the middle-income people who changed their minds have health insurance, but aren’t sure they can keep it. They value education, but have to depend on the public schools. They plan to send their kids to college, but aren’t sure they’ll be able afford it. They’re not angry and looking for someone to blame, but they are worried and looking for a reason to hope.
I don’t have a good explanation for why the low-income households haven’t shifted. Clinton carried them 53%-41%, and Northam’s margin was about the same: 56%-43%. Maybe a more dramatic message would have helped Northam here; I don’t know.
RCP’s Ross Baird found another interesting way to look at the results: He examined Virginia’s five “pivot counties”, counties that went Obama-Obama-Trump in the last three presidential elections: They were dead heats Tuesday. What most pivot counties have in common, he says, is that “more businesses have died there than have been born … despite a net increase in entrepreneurial activity across the country since the end of the Great Recession.”
That suggests that Democrats still haven’t completed the sale. Trump may have lost his shine, but there are still Obama voters Democrats aren’t reaching.
It was a big relief to me when Ralph Northam won the Virginia governor’s race by a wide margin. His opponent had been making a Trumpish white-identity-politics push, running against sanctuary cities (which Virginia doesn’t have) and Hispanic gangs, and in favor of continuing to celebrate the Confederacy. Some polls indicated that it was working, which said something I didn’t want to believe about Virginia and America and democracy in general. If Ed Gillespie had won, we’d see similarly ugly campaigns across the country in 2018, and maybe they’d work too.
It didn’t work. Northam won by a clear 9%, and Democrats held a similar margin in elections for Virginia’s lower house — though gerrymandering might allow Republicans to maintain control anyway. I’ll do a post mortem of the campaign and the exit polls in the featured post “What Did Virginia Teach Us?” That should be out by 10 EST.
The week’s other big story was Roy Moore. I still haven’t decided whether to leave my Moore observations in the weekly summary or pull them out into their own post. Then there was Senate Republicans’ tax-reform bill, which — even though they plan to pass it by Christmas — still isn’t a serious proposal, because it doesn’t fulfill the reconciliation rules they’ll need to get it through. They’re continuing to set up a replay of ObamaCare repeal, where no one will know what the bill really says until it’s time to vote. Then there were Trump’s comments siding with Putin over the “political hacks” who run the U.S. intelligence services, the sexual abuse scandals that continue to erupt everywhere you look, and some really bad theology. The summary will cover all that before closing with an animoji version of “Bohemian Rhapsody”. That should be out by noon.
There is this small group of people who are not equally subject to the laws as the rest of us, and that’s on purpose. … It won’t be lost on wealth managers and those in the offshore industry that we are reaching sort of French Revolution levels of inequality and injustice.
This week’s featured post is “Rigged?“, my reaction to that Donna Brazile book excerpt.
This week everybody was talking about indictments
Eight days ago, all we knew was that somebody was going to be indicted. Last Monday, we found out it was Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, who are accused of a long list of crimes, mostly involving money-laundering and schemes to either avoid taxes or defraud banks. The striking thing about the indictment is that it rests entirely on documents like vendor receipts, tax returns, and records of wire transfers. It will be hard to fight in court because it doesn’t depend on witnesses that a jury might be induced to distrust.
Also, some of the contents of the receipts would probably disgust a jury, even if the purchases are quite legal in themselves. For example, Manafort used wire transfers from foreign banks (which he didn’t report as income) to pay for more than $800K of purchases at a “men’s clothing store in New York” and another $500K at a similar store in Beverly Hills. I can imagine a middle-class juror wondering why anybody needs to dress that well.
A few hours later, Mueller released a sealed plea agreement with a Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, in which Papadopoulos pleads guilty to lying to the FBI. Papadopoulos was arrested July 27, and may have been working with the Mueller investigation since then. Some speculation has him wearing a wire. In the plea agreement, Papadopoulos admits to trying to arrange meetings between Russian officials and the Trump campaign, so that the campaign could obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.
In other developments, House Democrats released a few of the 3000 targeted social-media ads through which Russian bots and trolls tried to influence the election.
Trump defenders rightfully pointed out that the Manafort/Gates indictment is about their own shenanigans and didn’t directly implicate the Trump campaign (though it does say something about Trump’s judgment in hiring a crook to run his campaign). So it’s worth considering exactly where we are in the investigation.
At this point it’s pretty clear that the Russians were working to help Trump win. They hacked the Democrats and released damaging emails. They used social media to get around election-law restrictions against foreign campaign ads. They created and promoted fake news stories to help Trump and damage Clinton. No one can say precisely how effective all this was, but given Trump’s razor-thin margin, it’s not unreasonable to speculate that Putin made the difference in the election.
Russia wanted to get involved with the Trump campaign directly, and made at least two overtures promising “dirt” on Clinton. At least some members of the campaign were interested, but we don’t know yet whether or to what extent the Trump campaign actively cooperated with the Russian interference or even knew the scope of it.
Members of the Trump campaign and administration, including Trump himself, have repeatedly lied about Russia, the Russia investigation, and the campaign’s contacts with Russia. (Papadopoulos places Trump and Sessions at a meeting where he talked about his Russian contacts and their desire for a meeting. Both have denied knowing that the campaign had any contact with Russians.) Those lies do not by themselves prove that Trump or his people did anything wrong (other than lie), but it’s reasonable to assume that they lied for some reason.
The question in the minds of a lot of people now is: What about Mike Flynn? Flynn is another top Trump advisor who would be easy to indict. Is that indictment coming? Does the fact that it hasn’t come indicate that Flynn is working with the investigation? Those questions have got to be keeping a lot of Trump aides awake at night.
The apparent killer is white and no one has found a Muslim connection yet, so he is a “loner” whose violent tendencies don’t imply anything about our society or its problems. President Trump made sure we all realize that this isn’t a gun problem. Quite the opposite:
We have a lot of mental health problems in our country, as do other countries, but this isn’t a “guns” situation. I mean we could go into it, but it’s a little bit soon to go into it but fortunately, somebody else had a gun that was shooting in the opposite direction, it would have been as bad as it was, it would have been much worse.
Back in those simpler times of the Las Vegas shooting, it was disrespectful to the families of the dead to “politicize” the tragedy by discussing gun control only a day or two afterward. But after the NYC attack, Trump started talking about immigration and “political correctness” within three-and-a-half hours. Within 13 hours, he had blamed the attack on Chuck Schumer and Democrats in general. After 29 hours, he called for the death penalty against the presumed perpetrator. Previously, he had said he would consider sending him to Guantanamo and denounced the U.S. justice system:
We need quick justice and we need strong justice — much quicker and much stronger than we have right now. Because what we have right now is a joke and it’s a laughingstock.
It’s kind of amusing, in a macabre way, to look back at the things conservatives wrote after Las Vegas, like this Marc Thiessen column:
Imagine for a moment what would have happened if, in his Monday statement on the Las Vegas shooting, President Donald Trump had praised the police who ran toward the gunfire and saved so many lives, and then said: “And for all those who have been taking a knee to protest the police, shame on you. On Sunday, you slander them, but then on Monday, you need them. The police deserve our respect every day.”
Heads would have exploded — and rightly so. His critics would have pointed out that workers still had not removed all the bodies from the crime scene, and yet he was already injecting politics into this tragedy. The president’s job is to unite the country, they would have said, not divide us.
Of course, Trump did not say anything of the sort.
No, he was just waiting for a better opportunity.
Wednesday, another white guy in Colorado killed three three people at a Wal-Mart for no apparent reason. His apartment contained “a stack of Bibles and virtually no furniture”. If they’d been Qurans, it might have been a terrorism story. But Bibles? Never mind.
and the Republican tax proposal
It was supposed to come out Wednesday, but they couldn’t get it together in time, so it came out Thursday, sort of. Vox summarizes the provisions, and lists the winners: corporations, the ultra-wealthy, people making high-six-figure incomes, pass-through companies like the Trump Organization, and heirs to large fortunes. (I lack the gumption to read the whole 429-page bill. But have at it, if you’ve got the cycles to spare.)
But to me the most interesting part of the Vox article is the “Where the Bill Goes from Here” section near the end. In order to qualify for reconciliation in the Senate (i.e., avoiding a Democratic filibuster), the bill can’t increase the long-term deficit.
it’s hard to imagine the bill not raising the deficit after 10 years. Some provisions phase out, presumably to lower the long-run deficit effects for scoring purposes, but that’s unlikely to be enough. And so long as the legislation still increases the long-run deficit, it’s a nonstarter in the Senate.
What’s likely, then, is that this is an opening entry designed to pass the House and then be worked over, and shrunk in scale, in the Senate.
In other words, this is the kind of process I predicted: We still haven’t seen the real bill, the one they hope becomes law. That will probably come out at the last possible minute, when the CBO can’t analyze it in time for the vote, and the public can’t mobilize its opposition. As I wrote last week:
The strange process we keep seeing in Congress is an effort to stay inside the [conservative] fantasy bubble until the last possible minute, then to sprint across the open ground between fantasy-world debates and real-world decisions as fast as possible.
The bill also has some other culture-war poison pills that I suspect will have to come out before the Senate can apply reconciliation. For example, it partially repeals the Johnson amendment that prevents churches from endorsing candidates.
There are two versions of Johnson-amendment repeal. One seems fairly narrowly tailored to prevent a church from losing its tax-exempt status because of political statements made from the pulpit, and the other abandons all limits on church-sponsored political activity. This seems like the narrowly-tailored one (see page 427 of the 429-page bill), which is mostly just unnecessary, since ministers ignore the restriction now and the IRS doesn’t enforce it.
The broader version of Johnson-amendment repeal would be a disaster, since it would turn every American church into a potential pathway for tax-deductible anonymous contributions to enter a political campaign. Some critics are reporting that’s the version in the tax bill, but I don’t think it is.
529 accounts, tax-favored savings accounts through which families save for their children’s education, can begin while the child is in utero. It is the first use of the pro-life-movement term unborn child in the tax code.
immigrant parents without citizenship or green cards will lose access to the refundable tax credit for their children, even if those children are citizens. This affects about three million children.
One of the most outrageous tax loopholes — the “carried interest” break that allows hedge fund managers to report their fees as capital gains, saving one billionaire as much as $100 million a year — is untouched. #BillionairesFirst
and the Democrats
Donna Brazile’s new book is ripping the band-aid off the 2016 Democratic primary wound. I talked about this in the featured post.
and the Civil War
I hesitate to comment on John Kelly’s Civil-War opinions, because it looks to me like an intentional political maneuver. Many members of the Trump base, particularly in the South, are attached to a false account of the Civil War. They feel persecuted by anybody who tries to make them face reality, and insulted by experts who make them feel stupid for believing false things. By inducing the same people to attack him in the same way, Kelly gets the base to identify with him, and reassures them that he’s on their side.
His treatment of Rep. Frederica Wilson — lying about her and then refusing to acknowledge the lie or apologize for it, even after he’s been caught red-handed — is similar. The Trump base is full of folks who have insulted black people at one time or another, but they don’t want to apologize for it either. In standing by his lie, Kelly is standing up for all of them.
So anyway, Kelly sat for an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Monday evening, hours after the Mueller investigation unsealed its first indictments against officials of the Trump campaign. Shifting the narrative to the Civil War probably seemed like a good idea, and maybe it even was. It’s worth pointing out that Ingraham set up Kelly’s comments (beginning at the 18:20 mark) with a misleading premise:
A prominent church in Alexandria, Virginia, where George Washington worshiped — it’s historic, of course, and Robert E. Lee — they decided to pull the plaques memorializing both George Washington and Robert E. Lee because they want the church to be “inclusive” and be considered more tolerant. What is your reaction to that type of attempt to pull down little markers of history?
During Kelly’s answer, she injects: “They’ll be pulling down the Washington Monument at some point, or renaming it.” And Kelly jokes that it will be renamed after some “cult hero … Andy Warhol or someone like that”.
Actually, the church decided to move the plaques (which currently flank each side of the altar). But, according to the rector,
the plaques will remain in place until a new location for them is identified some time next year. A committee will be formed to deliberate on a new place of “respectful prominence.”
In other words, Washington and Lee are not being denied or hidden by the church, but it wants to be defined by Jesus rather than by Washington and Lee. (I can also imagine fans of Washington not wanting him to see him equated with Lee.) So Ingraham’s whole political-correctness-vs.-history angle is bogus.
Anyway, Kelly goes on to lecture about the inappropriateness of applying current standards of right-and-wrong to historical figures (which is valid in the abstract, up to a point), and brings up Columbus (who is maybe not the best example). He goes on to praise Lee as an “honorable man” and to repeat the Lost Cause narrative of the war:
The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their consciences had them make their stand.
So let’s not bicker about trivia like who enslaved who. Whether your ancestors were slaves, slave-drivers, or liberators of slaves — let’s just agree that they were all good people doing the best they could.
I guess I do have to comment: It’s one thing to look back at some relatively peaceful time, when social practices that we abhor today were barely challenged, and fault individuals for not rising above their community and its worldview. It’s hard to be significantly better than your era. I can imagine, for example, that a century from now everyone will be vegetarian. But it will wrong, I believe, for those people to dismiss some great person of our era by saying, “he was a barbaric animal-eater”.
It’s something else entirely, though, to give people a pass for taking a stand against changing abhorrent practices, at a time when those practices were up for decision. In the 1790s, a Southern slave-owner might just have accepted slavery as the way things are, maybe vaguely wishing things could be different in the way that so many of us today wish poverty would go away. But by 1861, when everyone is picking sides in a war whose fundamental issue is slavery, deciding to lead the defenders of slavery is not something you get a pass for. That’s not just hindsight. Robert E. Lee’s era raised a moral question, and he got it wrong.
It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees and Jefferson Davises will always be tall, handsome and well-born. That their courage will be physical and not moral. That their leadership will be weak compliance with public opinion and never costly and unswerving revolt for justice and right.
but be sure to pay attention to the Paradise Papers
Remember the Panama Papers? Well, there’s more: The same group (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists) has released another massive trove of leaked documents it calls the Paradise Papers. The international press hasn’t had time to absorb it all yet, but here’s the NYT’s description:
The core of the leak, totaling more than 13.4 million documents, focuses on the Bermudan law firm Appleby, a 119-year old company that caters to blue chip corporations and very wealthy people. Appleby helps clients reduce their tax burden; obscure their ownership of assets like companies, private aircraft, real estate and yachts; and set up huge offshore trusts that in some cases hold billions of dollars.
The files relate to a number of tax-haven islands (i.e. paradises, hence the name) where assets can change hands without government attention. The sheer number of scandals that will spin out of this is hard to estimate at this point, but here’s one:
After becoming commerce secretary, Wilbur L. Ross Jr. retained investments in a shipping firm he once controlled that has significant business ties to a Russian oligarch subject to American sanctions and President Vladimir V. Putin’s son-in-law, according to newly disclosed documents.
The shipper, Navigator Holdings, earns millions of dollars a year transporting gas for one of its top clients, a giant Russian energy company called Sibur, whose owners include the oligarch and Mr. Putin’s family member. …
In the wake of reports of Russian interference in the United States presidential election, multiple investigations have explored potential business ties between Russia and members of the Trump administration. While several Trump campaign and business associates have come under scrutiny, until now no business connections have been reported between senior administration officials and members of Mr. Putin’s family or inner circle.
and there are elections tomorrow — don’t forget about them
Governorships in Virginia and New Jersey are the headliners, but lots local issues will be on the ballot as well. (Here in Nashua, NH, we’re deciding whether to build a performing arts center.)
and you also might be interested in …
The presidential commission headed by Chris Christie has released its report on the opioid problem. Voxsummarizes its recommendations, which have an all-of-the-above flavor: they range from making treatment more accessible to changing doctors’ prescribing habits to law enforcement to a media campaign.
It looks like the commission took its job seriously, but it didn’t put price tags on its recommendations. It’s still unclear whether anyone will put up real money to deal with the problem.
The Pentagon just disappointed anybody who wanted to hear that a quick-and-easy series of air strikes could knock out North Korea’s nuclear capability. In response to questions from two Democratic congressmen, Ted Lieu of California and Ruben Gallego of Arizona, Rear Admiral Michael J. Dumont, the vice director of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, wrote a letter whose full text has not been released. But apparently the congressmen have shared parts of it with The Washington Post.
The only way to locate and secure all of North Korea’s nuclear weapons sites “with complete certainty” is through an invasion of ground forces, and in the event of conflict, Pyongyang could use biological and chemical weapons, the Pentagon told lawmakers in a new, blunt assessment of what war on the Korean Peninsula might look like.
Given Trump’s statement last month that “only one thing will work” in dealing with North Korea — we all assumed he meant force, but who really knows what Trump ever means? — I have to wonder if the Pentagon is telling him the same thing, and if he’s listening.
Maybe it would: The Alex Jones Show is telling its listeners that Hitler is still alive — at age 128. [After an objection in the comments, I feel obligated to add this: The guest-host on Alex Jones does say “The JFK files being declassified, Hitler still alive. All the history textbooks lied to us. I was lied to my entire life about JFK, knowingly, by my government. I was lied to my entire life about Hitler, knowingly, by my government.” But the kernel of truth in there comes from an actual story about the CIA investigating reports that Hitler was still alive in the 1950s.]
I’m going to defend a conservative judge: The Senate just confirmed Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. She’s not someone I want to see on the bench, but some of the attacks on her are unfair. Most are based on a report by Alliance for Justice, which says:
As a judge, Barrett could be expected to put her personal beliefs ahead of the law. She wrote specifically about the duty of judges to put their faith above the law in an article entitled “Catholic Judges in Capital Cases.” Among other things, she strongly criticized Justice William Brennan’s statement about faith, in which he said that he took an oath to uphold the law, and that “there isn’t any obligation of our faith superior” to that oath. In response, Barrett wrote: “We do not defend this position as the proper response for a Catholic judge to take with respect to abortion or the death penalty.”
That sounds terrible, doesn’t it? But if you actually read “Catholic Judges in Capital Cases“, it’s not what you think. She doesn’t say that a judge should rule based on her faith, even if the law says something different.
The article is about circumstances where a correct interpretation of the law requires a judge to give an order that a Catholic judge like Barrett might consider immoral: for example, to order the execution of a convicted murderer when church doctrine opposes the death penalty. If a judge applied Brennan’s opinion, she’d ignore her faith and order the execution anyway. But Barrett argues that if the conflict between the law and religious doctrine is really irresolvable — she puts some thought into ways it might be resolved, allowing the judge to sign the order with a clear conscience — the judge should recuse herself. In other words: Don’t put faith over the law, just get out of the conflicted situation.
I imagine that any judge with a moral code occasionally imagines laws he or she wouldn’t be willing to enforce. Recusal seems like the honorable choice.
There might have been all kinds of good reasons to oppose Barrett’s nomination, but in my mind this wasn’t one of them.
and let’s close with a guilty pleasure
Papa John’s pizza was in the news this week, because Papa himself blamed the chain’s falling sales on kneeling football players. The logic goes like this: Papa John’s strongly identifies itself with the NFL. (Peyton Manning is its most recognizable endorser.) So the Trump-invoked ambivalent feelings that eaters-of-mass-market-pizza are having about the NFL is causing them to buy less Papa John’s.
The Atlantic targets itself more at the haute cuisine crowd, people who would only enter a Papa John’s wearing sunglasses and a hat pulled low to hide their faces. But, in the same spirit of inquiry that sometimes motivated the Mythbusters to get drunk for science, the Atlantic staff decided that “investigative journalism” required them to explore the most likely alternate explanation: “that Papa John’s … is simply not very good.” In other words, they had to consume mass quantities of cheese and tomato sauce at the magazine’s expense — purely in the interest of the People’s right to know, of course.
Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, walked by the kitchen as the taste-test was going on. He looked upon his gathered employees, congratulated them on their dogged commitment to truth, gave a rousing speech about pizza and the American idea, told them that Ralph Waldo Emerson would be proud. The editor was offered a piece of pizza; he declined; he was informed that the spinach Alfredo pizza wasn’t actually as gross as it looked; he backed away.
What bad reviews are all about, and why people love to read them, is art of the Victorian insult: launching barbs at inferior beings without compromising your own superior dignity. The Atlantic does pretty well.
The relationship between the Clinton campaign and the DNC was more incestuous than we thought. Does it follow that the primaries were rigged and the nomination was stolen?
Thursday, former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile rocked the Democratic Party when an excerpt from her upcoming book was released by Politico. It begins shortly after the 2016 Convention, with Brazile taking the DNC’s acting chairmanship and promising Bernie Sanders that she’ll “get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process”. Though the excerpt never again uses the word rigged (and Brazile herself denied Sunday that the primaries were rigged), her strong implication is that the answer is Yes:
By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart.
The basic story she tells is that in 2015 the DNC was deep in debt, the Clinton campaign bailed it out, and in return it got control over many DNC decisions, like who the communications director would be, and veto power over a few other appointments. The memo outlining this agreement has since come out. As Brazile says, it outlines a surprising and ethically questionable degree of incest between the DNC and the Clinton campaign. However, it also includes this paragraph, which Brazile didn’t mention:
Nothing in this agreement shall be construed to violate the DNC’s obligation of impartiality and neutrality through the Nominating process. All activities performed under this agreement will be focused exclusively on preparations for the General Election and not the Democratic Primary.
So the big questions are: In spite of that paragraph, did the DNC violate its obligation of impartiality and neutrality? If so, did it do so in ways that made a material difference? And does this validate the claims Sanders supporters have been making all along, that the nomination was stolen away from Bernie?
How it looked at the time. During the campaign, claims from Sanders supporters that Clinton was rigging the primaries would periodically show up in my social-media feeds, and I’d check them out as well as an ordinary person with access to the internet reasonably could. I never found anything that held up, or that went beyond what I considered normal politics, where candidates are always jockeying for some kind of advantage.
It was clear to me that people at the DNC were rooting for Hillary to win, but I didn’t consider that shocking. If you’re in politics, you have political opinions; nobody is neutral in their hearts. Folks at the RNC were obviously rooting against Trump, too, and would have been much happier nominating Bush or Rubio. (I’m sure if you bugged the umpire’s locker room at a baseball stadium, you’d occasionally hear them talking about players they like and don’t like, because they were all baseball fans before they became umpires.) The question isn’t what DNC officials thought, or even the opinions that they traded with each other in emails they didn’t expect anyone else to see. The question what they did.
Brazile comments on that:
I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none.
Most of the theories I kept seeing went far beyond what the DNC would be able to do, even if it was completely suborned. Anything to do with polling places and vote-counting, for example, was way outside their capabilities. State and local election boards run primaries, not party national committees. But any voting irregularity in the Democratic primaries — even if it seemed just as likely to target Clinton voters — became part of the Clinton-is-stealing-Bernie’s-votes lore.
The mainstream press went through the same process I did, which is why only two specific DNC-related actions are getting mentioned in the articles about Brazile’s book:
the schedule of Democratic debates seemed tilted toward the candidate who didn’t need debates to get voters’ attention,
Hillary’s campaign pushed the legal limits of its DNC joint-fund-raising agreement, while Bernie’s campaign ignored theirs.
What’s new? Apparently, the Clinton campaign had more control over the DNC’s side of the joint-fund-raising money than we previously knew. That money was supposed to benefit the eventual nominee and the Party’s general-election effort as a whole. For the Clinton campaign to be in control of it was not right, but there are two very different possible levels of not-rightness here.
One possibility, the less toxic one, is that Clinton wanted the general-election machinery (data collection, polling, etc.) set up in a particular way, and didn’t want to wait until September to start doing it. This would be presumptuous, treating the nomination process as a foregone conclusion. But it would not have compromised the primary campaign. If Bernie had won, he would have found general-election machinery in place, ready for his use, but designed according to Hillary’s specifications.
The more toxic possibility is that the DNC’s money got funneled back into Clinton’s primary campaign, and was used against Bernie. If that’s true, that’s a very serious thing and heads should roll. Investigators should start looking for broken laws and start prosecuting people if they find any.
However, there was no evidence at the time that the second possibility was happening, and as far as I know there still isn’t. Brazile does not make that claim, and the documents she points to would seem to ban that, if they were followed. Anyone who wants to investigate that claim should have at it, and I’m willing to be convinced if any actual evidence shows up. But so far I haven’t seen any.
A spark in the gunpowder factory. People who write books often lead with something provocative and maybe a little overstated. It gets people talking about the book and makes it a must-read for anybody who wants to stay on top of the controversy. What Brazile has done in this excerpt, then, is not that unusual. (She does something similar elsewhere, telling a very unlikely story about the possibility of replacing Clinton with Biden after the convention. Throughout, Brazile portrays herself as being uniquely prescient about the coming debacle, despite the times when Clinton had double-digit leads in the polls.)
The problem is that her book isn’t coming out in a vacuum. In addition to debate schedules and other relatively minor things that appear to have actually happened, the pro-Bernie silo on the internet is still passing around charges of pro-Clinton vote-rigging and voter suppression that the evidence just does not support. It is an article of faith in certain circles that Bernie was the true choice of the voters, who had Clinton imposed on them by nefarious means.
It’s worth remembering the official vote totals. In the Democratic primaries as a whole, Clinton got 16.9 million votes, more than 55%. Her margin over Sanders was 3.7 million votes. Claiming that Sanders actually won requires believing in a fraud of the same scale as Trump’s claim that he actually won the popular vote in the general election.
In this environment, using the word rigged tells the conspiracy theorists that they were right all along. The claims Brazile is actually making may be fairly narrow, but the conclusions that people with prior opinions will draw from it are much broader.
The Trump parallel. It’s useful to compare Sanders’ situation on the Democratic side with Trump’s on the Republican side. Both were outsider candidates running against the party establishment, harnessing grass-roots discontent and anger. In each case, the party establishment believed it would be suicidal to nominate the outsider.
Going into the 2016 cycle, I think most observers would have claimed that the Republican establishment had more power than the Democratic. Democrats had a history of previously little-known candidates sweeping in: McGovern, Carter, Dukakis, Obama. On the Republican side, nominations more typically went to the next guy in line. The power brokers of the GOP are more obvious and more powerful. No Democratic donor, for example, plays as large a role as the Koch brothers do on the Republican side.
And yet, Trump got nominated and Sanders didn’t. Trump’s path, I think, shows the overall weakness of party establishments in this era. Nobody at the RNC was able to marginalize Trump, or to force out minor candidates who were splitting the establishment vote. Throughout Trump’s rise, we kept hearing about the theory from The Party Decides, in which “invisible primaries” of insiders pick the nominee, and then insiders signal the voters, who ratify the insiders’ choice in primaries.
In 2016 that theory held on the Democratic side but not on the Republican, for the simple reason, I think, that Trump got the votes and Sanders didn’t. You may or may not like the fact that Democratic voters ratified Clinton as the nominee, but they did.
What should happen? To start with, Hillary Clinton has already told us that she’s not running for anything again, so unless laws were broken — and not even Brazile claims that — there’s really nothing to be done regarding her personally.
Obviously, the DNC will need to be extra transparent in the next cycle, and hopefully beyond. No one enters the 2020 cycle in the same commanding position Clinton had four years ago, though, so it’s hard to see how the same mistakes would be made anyway. But there needs to be some process by which we can all assure ourselves that no candidate is getting an unfair advantage from the Party.
Beyond that, there’s a bigger problem that affects the Republicans as well as the Democrats: Parties are open to being dominated by candidates like Clinton, or bullied by large donors like the Kochs, because they are inherently weak in this era. Bernie Sanders represents a different side of this problem: The Democratic Party isn’t something he belongs to (he doesn’t), it’s just a structure for seeking office.
Democrats suffer for this at the local level more than Republicans, because Republicans are more likely to be funded by state-level power brokers like North Carolina’s Art Pope, or by corporations who understand the power state government has to dole out favors. Democrats are more reliant on the star-power of national candidates like Obama or Clinton or Sanders, and the local parties correspondingly get short-changed.
It could be that we are in a transitional period, and parties will eventually go away, or come to mean something completely different. I wish I had something more to say about the coming structure, and whether it will be better or worse.
Just another week in Trump’s America: the New York City bikepath killing got shoved off the front pages by the Texas church shooting; the Republican tax reform bill came out, or at least a Republican tax-reform bill came out (this one doesn’t look like the bill the eventually intend to pass); we all tried to absorb the implications of the Manafort/Gates indictment and what Papadopoulos’ guilty plea told us about the Trump-Russia courtship and its cover-up; Donna Brazile yanked the band-aid off the wound of the 2016 Democratic primary campaign; and John Kelly gave us his theory of the Civil War.
And then this morning, the International Consortium of International Journalists unveiled the Paradise Papers, a huge leak of documents about how the rich and powerful hide their wealth, their deals, and their relationships by running them through tiny island nations. Just for starters, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has some explaining to do.
Whatever will I find to talk about?
What I plan to do is a featured post on the Donna Brazile story, which will appear around 10 EST, I think, and then cover the rest of it in an unusually long weekly summary, which I’ll target for noon.
Friday night, several news organizations started reporting that the Mueller grand jury had sealed one or more indictments. The weekend was full of speculation, but the investigation’s security held, and nobody knew who the targets were.
This morning we found out: Former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates. That just happened, so I don’t know anything yet that isn’t in the Washington Post article. I didn’t remember Gates, but he was also part of the Trump campaign and stayed on after Manafort left. Since the election, Gates worked on fund-raising for Trump’s inauguration, and other Trump-related fund-raising.
But before that, everybody was talking about opioids
Nothing much has changed since I wrote about it in April, when Trump appointed the commission whose report is due Wednesday. Drug overdoses kill more people than car accidents. The annual total of American drug-overdose deaths is over 50K — roughly the same as the death total for the entire Vietnam War. (Since April, the 2016 totals have come out: 64K overdose deaths.) About a third of those deaths are from legal prescription drugs, and many of the people who die from illegal-drug overdoses first got addicted to legal drugs.
The opioid crisis is an emergency, and I’m saying officially, right now, it is an emergency. It’s a national emergency.
That would have been an unorthodox move — a typical national emergency is sudden disaster like a hurricane or a flood, not a problem that has been building for decades, and FEMA is an odd agency to task with confronting drugs — but it would definitely have shaken things up.
But it was a false alarm. Trump seems not to have understood that the phrase national emergency has a specific meaning under the law, and is more than just another way of saying crisis or really bad problem. (This is like the difference between “making a federal case” out of something and actually filing charges in federal court.) So in spite of what he said, no national-emergency proclamation was ever signed. No FEMA. No new federal money.
Thursday, he announced something that sounds similar, but is actually very different: He proclaimed a “public health emergency”. That’s not nothing, but it doesn’t unlock any new funding. It allows some rules to be waived and some already-appropriated money to be moved around.
Most of the “actions” he mentioned in his speech were not new. For example,
We are requiring that a specific opioid, which is truly evil, be taken off the market immediately.
The opioid is Opana, and the FDA removed it from the market in June. It’s not clear whether the new administration had anything to do with that, or if it was just the career FDA people doing what they do. He also mentioned several ongoing efforts as if they were new initiatives: looking for non-addictive painkillers, asking the Chinese to crack down on fentanyl production, and so on.
It’s possible that something significant will be announced after the report comes out Wednesday, but Trump’s speech was a lot more flash than substance. USA Today quotes Baltimore health commissioner Leana Wen:
The public health emergency raises awareness, which is important, but we had hoped for a national state-of-emergency declaration, because that would carry with it a commitment for funding. We don’t need more rhetoric. We need resources.
Any major government effort against drugs will have to be leaderless for the near future: Tom Marino’s nomination as drug czar had to be withdrawn after he became the primary villain of this 60 Minutes segment. He was the point man for the drug industry’s successful effort to stop the DEA from prosecuting distributors who knowingly fill suspicious orders for large quantities of prescription drugs. (Marino shows up in the second half of the video. He is the lead sponsor of a bill written by the industry to handcuff the DEA, and then he starts an investigation that sidelines an aggressive DEA investigator until he quits.) The entire thing is a great lesson on how big business influences government at all levels, to the detriment of the American people. (The Marino bill’s second sponsor, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, is currently running to replace Bob Corker in the Senate.)
In the absence of a drug czar, leadership might come from the department level. But HHS Secretary Tom Price had to resign after it came out that he wasted as much as a million dollars of the taxpayers’ money on his personal travel. His replacement has still not been nominated, but the rumored front-runner is a drug-company executive.
Trump’s speech used the opioid problem to score political points on other issues. For example:
An astonishing 90 percent of the heroin in America comes from south of the border, where we will be building a wall which will greatly help in this problem. (Applause.) It will have a great impact.
No, actually it won’t. Sanjay Gupta has been reporting on this for CNN. The synthetic opioid causing the most deaths, fentanyl, comes in through legal entry points or through the U.S. mail. It isn’t usually smuggled across the open border.
For bulkier drugs that come across the border somewhere other than the ports of entry, there are other post-wall smuggling options: Dig tunnels under it or fly over it with drones. A wall is a fixed obstacle that takes years to build. Smugglers will adapt to it much faster than Homeland Security can alter it.
Here in America, we are once again enforcing the law; breaking up gangs and distribution networks; and arresting criminals who peddle dangerous drugs to our youth.
Obama wasn’t enforcing drug laws? Wasn’t breaking up gangs? Oh wait, I get it: You’re talking about deporting Mexicans (which Obama was also doing), because our drug problem is all their fault. It’s the immigrant-crime-wave lie from Trump’s convention speech.
This was an idea that I had, where if we can teach young people not to take drugs — just not to take them. … The fact is, if we can teach young people — and people, generally — not to start, it’s really, really easy not to take them. And I think that’s going to end up being our most important thing. Really tough, really big, really great advertising, so we get to people before they start, so they don’t have to go through the problems of what people are going through.
Tell young people not to start using drugs? That’s genius, Mr. President! Genius! When you say it so clearly, I have to wonder why no one ever thought of that before. I understand now why you so often need to remind us that you’re “a very intelligent person“.
Trump claims to know the importance of teaching the young to just say no, because his alcoholic brother Fred warned him never to drink or smoke or do drugs, so he never did. But Ana Marie Cox (self-describing as “a recovering addict and alcoholic”) notes the ineffectiveness of campaigns against “pleasurable but illicit behavior” in general and drugs in particular:
The federal government spent $10 million a year on DARE until 2002, when a surgeon general’s report stated that “numerous well-designed evaluations and meta-analyses that consistently show little or no deterrent effects on substance use.”
She also wonders whether “someone, somewhere once warned Donald Trump not to cheat on his wife.”
Here’s another thing that has started to annoy me: In talking about how bad the opioid problem is in West Virginia, he called it “a truly great state, great people”. He says stuff like that a lot, and it means something very specific: They voted for me. I haven’t done a comprehensive search, but I can’t recall Trump (as president) ever mentioning the “great people” of California or Illinois or Massachusetts.
Since Trump voters are overwhelmingly white, there’s also a racial subtext: The addicts of rural West Virginia aren’t like those low-life addicts in the black ghettos of Chicago or Baltimore. The West Virginia addicts are good Christian white people who deserve the compassion of other good Christian white people.
It’s important to keep in mind that this is not normal American political rhetoric. Previous presidents of both parties have understood that, once elected, they had become president of all the people, and not just of the people who voted for them. Trump doesn’t get this.
and tax reform
More about this in the featured post. The House passed the Senate’s budget resolution, so they’re set up to pass a tax reform bill that adds $1.5 trillion to the national debt without any Democratic votes. The basic problem: All but $1.5 trillion of the tax cuts Republicans want need to be cancelled out by eliminating “loopholes”. Unfortunately, everybody thinks loopholes are the deductions other people take advantage of, not the deductions they claim themselves. Hence the Long quote at the top.
and Jeff Flake
The speech he gave Tuesday on the Senate floor is worth reading.
There are times when we must risk our careers in favor of our principles.
It’s hard for someone as liberal as I am to know what to do with Flake and the handful of other Republicans like him, because the principles he wants to risk his career for are not my principles. To me, the moment for a principled exit came and went a long time ago. But Trump only falls if Republicans turn against him, so we need to make space for them to turn against him.
It’s complicated. So I’m thinking about this, and should have more to say in a week or two.
and the Russia investigation
In addition to the just-announced indictments, we learned a little more about the meeting in Trump Tower between a Russian lawyer and top Trump campaign people (Paul Manafort, Donald Jr., and Jared Kushner). Some of the information they were offered had previously been given to a Republican Congressman by a high Russian government official. This undermines the lawyer’s claim to be independent of Putin.
We also learned about the funding of the Steele dossier. It had been known since shortly after the dossier first became public that it had started as Republican-funded opposition research, but was dropped when Trump’s nomination became inevitable, and then was picked up by Democrats. Now we know more specifics: The first funder was the conservative web site Washington Free Beacon, and it was later picked up by the Clinton campaign. All of the research was conducted by the same firm: Fusion GPS.
On the right, the involvement of the Clinton campaign is being treated as some kind of scandal, one that discredits the dossier itself and perhaps even the whole Russia investigation. But I’m not seeing it. Opposition research is a normal part of American politics. (Much of what Bill Clinton got investigated for began as opposition research paid for by conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. I don’t recall Republicans having any problem with that.) Nothing in the Russia investigation is based on the authority of the dossier. We know that the FBI has been checking the claims in the dossier, but nothing is being accepted as true just because the dossier says so.
Let’s simplify things: Suppose opposition research had uncovered evidence that Trump robbed a bank, and a Justice Department investigation independently proved that conclusion. Would the big story be the opposition research, or the fact that Trump robbed a bank?
The main questions in the investigation are:
What did the Russian government do to try to influence our election?
Did anyone inside the Trump campaign know they were getting help from Russia, and did anyone actively cooperate?
Has the Russian government gotten anything from the Trump administration in exchange for its help?
Since the investigation started, has Trump or anybody else committed perjury or tried to obstruct justice?
Anything else is secondary. For example, I don’t particularly care about the sexual allegations in the dossier. I only care if Russian intelligence has something to hold over Trump’s head and has used it to influence him.
An old Republican conspiracy theory — that when she was Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton OK’d a Russian company’s deal to buy a North American uranium company in exchange for a big contributions to the Clinton Foundation — has surfaced again, and will be investigated by three different committees in the House. If Hillary didn’t exist, I think Republicans would need to invent her. Even after she eventually dies, I suspect Republicans will continue investigate her whenever they need to divert their base voters’ attention from their own scandals.
The WaPo’s fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, covers all the important points. The gist is that while the one-line description sounds scandalous, no details have ever emerged to back up any part of it. Treasury was the lead department on the approval, and “there is no evidence Clinton even was informed about this deal.” How the Russians are supposed to have bribed the other eight agencies involved the process is also unexplained.
and draining the swamp
Some recent stories demonstrate that the swamp has only gotten swampier since Trump took over.
A tool of the big drug companies got nominated to be drug czar. (Discussed above.) If not for 60 Minutes and The Washington Post, he’d probably have been confirmed. After the Tool (Rep. Tom Marino of Pennsylvania) withdrew his nomination, President Trump tweeted that he is “a fine man and a great congressman”.
If you have a dispute with your bank, quite likely you can’t take it to court and can’t join other individuals in a class-action lawsuit, because the fine print of your contract says you have to submit to binding arbitration as an individual. (You could switch to another bank, but its fine print would say the same thing.) The Consumer Financial Protection Board nixed that process in June with a new regulation that allowed class-action lawsuits against banks in more circumstances. The House immediately voted to repeal that regulation, and the Senate followed suit Tuesday, passing what critics call the Wells Fargo Immunity Act. It was a 51-50 vote along party lines, with only two Republican defections. VP Pence broke the tie.
and anniversaries
Depending on how you count, the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution was either October 25 (the date on Julian calendar in use in Russia at the time) or will be November 7 (the date on the Gregorian calendar that most to the rest of the world was using and Russia adopted in 1918). The 500th anniversary of the Reformation is tomorrow. (That’s also by the Julian calendar; nobody seems to worry much about the 10 days that were added when the Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1582.)
but check out this article on the future of electricity
The old fantasy was to be off the grid. The new fantasy is to be on a grid designed for sustainability.
and you also might be interested in …
Most of Puerto Rico is still without electrical power. The governor tweeted this photo of surgery being performed using a phone as a flashlight. Nurses returning to the mainland from emergency work in Puerto Rico have been very critical of what’s going on there.
The nurses described doctors performing surgery in hospitals with light from their cellphones, children screaming from hunger, elderly residents suffering from severe dehydration, and black mold spreading throughout entire communities.
“We cannot be silent while millions of people continue to endure these conditions,” said Bonnie Castillo, associate executive director of National Nurses United.
Normally, the Virginia governor’s race doesn’t have much predictive value nationally. Democrat Terry McAuliffe won in 2013, for example, and Democrats went on to get pounded in the 2014 mid-terms.
This year’s race might be different, though, because Republican Ed Gillespie is running in a very Trumpian style: His campaign has a not-very-veiled racial focus, with red-meat ads about rampaging Hispanic gangs and defending Confederate monuments. Polls show that this tactic has energized non-college white voters to support him. The question is whether it is turning off the educated white suburbanites a Republican also needs if he’s going to win in Virginia. A recent poll says that it is, and that Northam is winning. We’ll see if that prediction is verified on November 6.
If it isn’t, if Gillespie pulls out a last-minute win due to a heavy white turnout, then I think his campaign becomes the model for an ugly 2014: Republicans will try to make the election a racial referendum.
Like Trump, Gillespie treats the national media as enemies. Here, Washington Post reporter Marc Fisher posts a sad but also amusing video of his attempts to find and speak to Gillespie.
Ezra Klein on the implications of the Mark Halperin and Leon Wieseltier sexual harassment scandals:
We routinely underestimate what it means that our political system has been constructed and interpreted by men, that our expectations for politicians have been set by generations of male politicians and shaped by generations of male pundits. … The most influential institutions in America have long had serial sexual abusers and deep misogynists at their apex. Those abusers didn’t just shape their workplaces or their industries; they shaped our politics, our culture, and our country.
During the campaign, for example, Halperin described women’s accusations against Trump as “nothing even kind of, like, beyond boorish or politically incorrect”.
One reason why this kind of thing has remained acceptable for so long is that so many of the people shaping public opinion were doing it themselves.
If the Harvey Weinstein case started you wondering about Trump again, let Sarah Huckabee Sanders set you straight: All of the 17 women who accused him of sexual harassment or assault were lying.
Vox’ Anna North and Ezra Klein note the similarities between Weinstein and Trump, and then draw this conclusion:
This is, perhaps, the depressing lesson of the Weinstein and Trump stories. The allegations are similar. The evidence is similar. But power still protects, and while Weinstein had lost enough power to imperil his protection, Trump has only amassed more.
Our new ambassador to Canada claims to believe “both sides of the science” about climate change, as if climate change were some sort of quantum wave/particle duality. The best response comes from the NASA-based Twitter account that claims to be the AI running the Mars rover.
On the one side you have evidence and data and research, and on the other side you have… oil money. Both equal.
and let’s close with some bad suggestions
Haven’t decided on your Halloween costume yet? Don’t do any of these.
It’s not Trump. It’s the fantasy-bubble that conservative voters live inside.
The most surprising thing about last summer’s many attempts to repeal ObamaCare wasn’t that they failed. It was the peculiar way that the legislation proceeded in both houses of Congress: without meaningful committee hearings, with minimal debate on the floor of either the House or Senate, sometimes without analysis from the CBO, and often without a even draft of a bill until the last possible moment. Again and again, Republicans were urged to vote Yes, not because the plan in front of them was good for American healthcare, but to “keep the process moving”. If McConnell and Ryan could have passed a healthcare bill in a sealed envelope, not to be opened until the White House signing ceremony, I think they would have.
The secret sauce that would make it all work was always going to be added later, by someone else: Moderates in the House supported the AHCA, believing the Senate would fix the aspects of it that President Trump later called “mean“. Senators offered to vote for the “skinny repeal” only if Paul Ryan could guarantee that the House would change it. Graham-Cassidy passed the buck to the states: Sure, it looked like less money that would give worse coverage to fewer people, but since all the details would be decided at the state level, senators could tell themselves the magic would happen there.
Republican governors, meanwhile, were mostly relieved the bill failed, because they had no magic either.
Gov. Brian Sandoval said Thursday that the flexibility fellow Republican Sen. Dean Heller promised will be good for Nevada in a health-care bill he’s sponsoring is a “false choice” because the legislation will also slash funding.
Because these efforts kept failing, Congress actually ended up spending a great deal of time on ObamaCare-repeal bills. The first one failed in the House in March, and Graham-Cassidy didn’t fail until the end of September. But it was more than half a year of breathless sprints, without any time to tell the public what they were doing.
All in all, it was no wonder the various ObamaCare-repeal bills polled badly. Literally no one was explaining to the people exactly what this particular bill did and why it would be good for them.
Go back, Jack, do it again. Now we’re on to tax reform, and the same strange process seems to be repeating. Republicans are absolutely in agreement that they are for tax reform. It’s going to cut corporate tax rates, but also give major benefits to the middle class. It will be “pro-growth”, and will avoid blowing up the deficit by “closing loopholes”, though no one can seem to agree on any particular loophole. Trump listed the “principles” tax reform will be based on, and then leaders from the House, Senate, and Trump administration agreed on a “framework“. Now the congressional leadership has even set a deadline: Thanksgiving.
But there’s no bill. It’s rumored a bill will appear in the House this week, maybe Wednesday, but no one seems to know what will be in it. They’re still announcing major changes (like property tax deductions), still negotiating on other significant details (401(k) deductions), and losing support over the few decisions they have announced (mortgage interest).
The framework says that individual income taxes will have three tax brackets (or maybe four), and names the rates for those brackets, but not the income levels where those rates kick in. 20% has been floated as a corporate tax rate, and maybe the deficit will be allowed to go up an additional $1.5 trillion over ten years, but that’s not set in stone either. Hardly anything is.
Thanksgiving is just a few weeks away, and the public is in the same situation it was with the various healthcare bills: Republicans can make lofty claims about what the tax-reform bill will ultimately deliver, but any hard analysis that refutes those claims can be hand-waved away, because the details aren’t set yet. [1]
Once again, Republicans are justifying their votes not on the content of what they’re voting for, but to move the process along. John McCain, for example, voted Yes on the Senate version of the budget resolution that sets up tax reform, but said: “At the end of the day, we all know that the Senate budget resolution will not impact final appropriations.” Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) justified his Yes vote like this: “The budget that came back to us is a crap sandwich, but it happens to be the only thing on the menu.”
If the ObamaCare-repeal pattern continues to hold, the bill announced this week will debut to a hail of criticism and will go back into whatever secret negotiations produced it. This will happen as many times as is necessary to set up a last-minute, there’s-no-time-for-a-CBO-analysis vote. Wavering Republicans won’t be persuaded with facts and logic, they’ll be pressured with threats of mid-term disaster if the bill doesn’t pass. Whatever it actually says won’t be the point.
No one will claim this bill, but everyone will insist they have no choice but to pass it. Whether they do or not will come down to one or two votes.
Why does this keep happening? There’s no reason why Republicans couldn’t have introduced a tax-reform bill months ago, scheduled several weeks of hearings in all the appropriate committees, and tried to raise public support for their ideas in the usual way. They could argue that their bill is actually good, rather than claiming that they have no choice. They could have done the same on healthcare, and they could do the same on all the rest of their priorities: immigration, infrastructure, and so forth.
So why don’t they?
The answer is actually quite simple: Republican base voters live in a fantasy world that long predates Donald Trump. It has been carefully constructed over decades by politicians, Fox News, talk radio, and the rest of the conservative media establishment. Here are a few features of that fantasy world:
Tax cuts pay for themselves by creating economic growth.
Government spending is mostly waste, so it can be slashed without hurting anybody.
Climate change isn’t happening, or if it is, burning fossil fuels has nothing to do with it.
When the rich make money, everybody makes money.
The free market can solve all problems, including providing healthcare to the poor.
White Christians are the primary victims of discrimination.
The uninsured can get all the medical treatment they need in emergency rooms.
Elections at all levels are tainted by massive voter fraud, as millions of illegal immigrants cast ballots.
Big business wants what’s best for America, so there’s no need to stop them from polluting our air and water, or from making products that kill their workers or customers.
The fantasies are so extensive, and so divorced from reality, that there is literally no major issue that can be discussed in a rational way inside that bubble.
Any public debate Republican politicians participate in has to happen inside that bubble, because anyone who disputes any of those fantasies will be labeled a RINO and will likely face a primary opponent who sticks to the bubble orthodoxy.
That process worked great as long as they were out of power. The Ryans and McConnells and Cruzs and Gohmerts could have fantasy-world discussions that came to fantasy-world conclusions, and it was all fine, because none of it ever had to confront reality. They never accomplished what their voters wanted — nobody could have, since it’s impossible — but that was OK, because those horrible Democrats were blocking the way. It all would work, if only they were in charge.
So now they’re in power. All Republican public debate still has to happen inside the fantasy bubble, but now at some point the results of that debate have to transit over to the real world. There have to be actual pieces of legislation that do real things that can be analyzed by people who live in reality. And even if Republicans can discredit that analysis somehow, eventually there are still real events to deal with. Eventually, people pay taxes and drive on roads and send their kids to schools. They find (or don’t find) jobs and get (or lose) health insurance. The fantasies and rhetoric don’t help you then.
The strange process we keep seeing in Congress is an effort to stay inside the fantasy bubble until the last possible minute, then to sprint across the open ground between fantasy-world debates and real-world decisions as fast as possible.
So for a few more days, tax reform can be great and wonderful. It can give every worker a raise, set off an investment boom, and cut everybody’s taxes without losing revenue. Whatever tax break you’re worried about losing — don’t worry, the details aren’t set yet.
But soon they’ll have to publish a bill that the public can read. Then the sprint will start.
[1] For comparison, the first version of ObamaCare — the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act — was introduced in the House on July 14, 2009. The final version, the ACA, was passed on March 23, 2010, about 8 months later. Various things got changed during that time, but for every day of those 8 months, ObamaCare was a real proposal that could be authoritatively critiqued and analyzed.
It’s not Trump. It’s the fantasy-bubble that conservative voters live inside.
The Weekly Sift 