It seemed like everybody had to comment. These people just did it better than the rest.
By now all the people who want to — and probably a lot who never wanted to — have seen the video of Donald Trump talking to Access Hollywood co-host Billy Bush in 2005, apparently without realizing he was being recorded. The Washington Postreleased the video Friday, Trump released what has been oxymoronically described as a “defiant apology” late Friday night, and the resulting firestorm dominated the news shows leading up to last night’s town-hall debate with Hillary Clinton. Many big-name Republicans who had tolerated Trump’s previous outrageous statements finally withdrew their support. [1] Trump’s running mate Mike Pence has not withdrawn his support, but has kept Trump at arm’s length, saying
I do not condone his remarks and cannot defend them. [2]
When asked about the video by Anderson Cooper early in Sunday’s debate, Trump dismissed it as “locker room talk”, a phrase he apparently wanted to leave vague, but Cooper (to his credit) insisted on unpacking: Was Trump saying that he did or didn’t do the things he bragged about, like kiss women without their consent or “grab them by the pussy”? After several attempts to get away with a general affirmation of his respect for women, Trump finally claimed that he had not done those things, i.e., that he had been lying to Bush. So Trump’s defense is that he is not a sexual abuser, he just likes to impress other guys by claiming to be one.
Cooper did not explore the trying-to-have-sex-with-a-married-woman confession in the video, so (as far as I know) Trump has not had to say whether that really happened. [3]
Obviously, there are many angles from which to react to this series of events. I’ve picked out a few that I found more insightful than the rest.
Best debate tweets.
Erin Chack: Scary Halloween costume idea: Dress up like Trump, go to a party, and stand 3-5 feet behind successful women.
Jake Beckman posts a similar image with this caption:
Here’s the debate where Donald Trump tries to not look like a sexual predator.
Every woman watching has had a creepy dude pace behind her.
Aren’t you guys supposed to be religious? Naively, you might think that the people who would abandon Trump first over stuff like this would be the family-values folks, particularly evangelical Christians. But the reverse seems to be true: Even as elected Republicans head for the exits, evangelical leaders like Ralph Reed and Jerry Falwell Jr. are standing by Trump.
The best comment I’ve seen on that is the image on the right. If looks to be a illustration from the Bible story of the three men in the fiery furnace. During the Babylonian Captivity, three young Jewish men refuse to bow down to a golden statue of King Nebuchadnezzar, and are miraculously saved from his punishment.
The image has been annotated by having one of the kneeling men say, “He’s going to appoint pro-life supreme court justices.” In other words: If you want to bow down to the ruling power, you can always find some reason to do so. In the actual Bible story, the three heroes do not discuss Nebuchadnezzar’s policies before deciding what to do.
How abusers talk after they’re caught. In a tweet storm captured by Valerie on Storify.com, Leah McElrath responded to Trump’s “defiant apology” by taking it apart phrase-by-phrase and framing it as
an eerie replica of psychological manipulations made by abusers after episodes of abuse.
What McElrath hears in Trump’s video is less an apology than an attempt to make his accusers doubt themselves and their experiences. For example
“these words do not reflect who I am” = the reality you just experienced didn’t actually happen (gaslighting)
and
“We’re living in the real world” = I’m sane and you’re crazy
His contrast between himself and Bill Clinton, who “has actually abused women” translates to “the abuse you experienced wasn’t *really* abuse”.
McElrath’s interpretation explains Trump’s bizarre demeanor throughout this video: He is glowering and angry, not contrite or ashamed.
After reading McElrath, I see the apology video as an expression of the essence of a privileged and entitled attitude: It is up to me to judge whether or not I have done wrong, and if so, what I must do or say to make it right. Anyone who won’t accept the atonement I have assigned myself and move on is being unreasonable, and if they persist I will be forced to get angry with them.
Dear GOP dudes who are suddenly realizing that Donald Trump is a flaming misogynist after more than a year of women telling you that he is, in fact, a flaming misogynist. Thanks for joining us and welcome to the club, or, as other people call it, planet earth. … So what was the moment that gave it away for you?
My favorite part of her video on this is her response to the line from Trump’s apology: “Anyone who knows me knows these words don’t reflect who I am.”
Anyone who knows you? You go out of your way to demean women. That’s your thing. That’s your brand. It’d be like saying that Mr. T doesn’t pity the fool.
How this looks if you’re black. CNN’s Van Jones went off on an epic rant, though not on CNN.
What if a black man — Candidate Obama in 2008, say — had been caught on tape talking about forcing kisses on women, groping their genitals, and trying to tempt married women into infidelity? To begin with
If Donald Trump were black, the very first word used to describe him would be thug. … The fact that we’re talking about “locker room banter” … what locker room you in?
If he were black, we’d be talking about crime.
Let’s just be very clear: Donald Trump has confessed to a sex crime. … When black people do stuff, we quickly rush to criminality. When white people do stuff, it’s like “OK, well, this is frat-boy behavior.” Whereas with us it’s thuggish behavior. … If I were to go up to Donald Trump and grab Donald Trump’s crotch and try to kiss Donald Trump, I would go to jail. I would be arrested. That’s called sexual assault. It is a crime.
… You have somebody running for president of the United States, who has confessed on tape to committing sex crimes, and people are talking about it as if there’s something wrong with the language. We’re talking about him using “lewd speech”. I don’t care about the speech. I’ve heard those words before. What I care about is the activity, the deed that he is describing.
What if Obama had had five children by three women, as Trump has?
If [Trump] were a brother, they’d be talking about the breakdown of the black family and all sort of stuff. What’s wrong with this man? Second of all, can you imagine if Barack Obama had been caught on video saying … he’s grabbing people’s crotches, he can kiss anybody he wants to, he’s a star, he’s a celebrity, he can do whatever he wants to, they like it. It would be over. We would be talking about the breakdown of values and what’s wrong with black men, and black male violence and all that sort of stuff.
To people who are sick of women “playing the gender card”, Jones asks:
What if Hillary Clinton were going around grabbing people’s crotches? Would we having this conversation or would she be on the first ship to Mars? … No black man in America could be in this situation without the entire universe coming down on the whole black community, number one. And number two: No woman could even think about going around grabbing nobody’s crotches and bragging about it, male or female.
Whose locker room? Like Jones, lots of men have a problem with describing the Trump video as “locker room talk”. Lots of men have come forward to say something like “I don’t hear that kind of talk in locker rooms.” But actually, this is a hard case to make either way, because there is no Locker Room Today that establishes national standards.
What we mean by “locker room” is groups of men talking to each other in ways they wouldn’t if women were present. And almost by definition, each of those groups is unique. For all I know there could be groups of serial killers who get together to trade stories about their latest kills. I personally don’t find myself in such groups, but really, who knows?
But we should at least pay some attention to professional male athletes, who spend large chunks of their lives hanging around with other men in literal locker rooms. AP collected several of their comments, like this one from Kansas City Chiefs receiver Chris Conley
Have I been in every locker room? No. But the guys I know and respect don’t talk like that. They talk about girls but not like that. Period.
This matches my personal experience of crude man-to-man talk: You’ll hear comments that objectify women (“Whoa, check out that butt.”) or fantasize about sex (“I wouldn’t kick her out of bed.”) or make exaggerated claims about a man’s own attractiveness (“I could totally nail her. She’s into me. You can tell.”). But even in a locker-roomish environment, I’d find it creepy and over-the-line to hear somebody brag about forcing himself on a woman the way Trump did. I don’t believe most men would confront a guy who talked like that — and I won’t claim that I would, because I think that’s a situation you have to experience before you can be sure what you’d do — but at a minimum I would expect the other guys in the room to quickly change the subject, or back away and find excuses to be somewhere else.
[1] The New York Times is keeping a list of them. For the most part, the Republicans rejecting Trump were never gung-ho about him, but previously had not been willing to take a stand against their party’s nominee. The explanation of 2008 nominee Senator John McCain is fairly typical:
I thought it important I respect the fact that Donald Trump won a majority of the delegates by the rules our party set. I thought I owed his supporters that deference. But Donald Trump’s behavior this week, concluding with the disclosure of his demeaning comments about women and his boasts about sexual assaults, make it impossible to continue to offer even conditional support for his candidacy.
On Twitter, Mr. Trump attacked the Republicans fleeing his campaign as “self-righteous hypocrites” and predicted their defeat at the ballot box. In a set of talking points sent to his supporters Sunday morning, Mr. Trump’s campaign urged them to attack turncoat Republicans as “more concerned with their political future than they are about the country.”
Someone must have pointed out to Trump that if McCain, Rob Portman, and Kelly Ayotte do get defeated and he himself somehow wins, he’ll face a Democratic Senate. But it’s not clear he cares about that.
[2] Trump, in turn, backhanded Pence during the debate. After moderator Martha Raddatz read him something critical Pence had said about Russia’s actions in Syria, a position apparently at odds with what Trump had just said, Trump’s response was bizarrely cold and abrupt: “He and I haven’t spoken, and I disagree.” Try to imagine President Obama saying that about Joe Biden.
[3] By several accounts, the unnamed married woman discussed in the video was Billy Bush’s co-host, Nancy O’Dell.
The hardest kind of week for me to sift happens when we’re all staying up Sunday night watching a major news event and still buzzing about it Monday morning. So expect everything to be slow today.
My snap judgment on the debate is that both candidates did what they needed to do. Clinton was trying to stay on track to victory, so she wanted to appeal to the majority of the country. Trump was trying to stop a meltdown in his support by rallying his base. So if you already believed that Hillary belongs in jail, you were thrilled to hear Trump all but promise to put her there. But if you came to the debate looking for an American president rather than a third-world despot, you probably weren’t impressed.
I considered writing about something not related to the debate, Trump, and his 2005 discussion of sexual assault and trying to get married women into bed. But I came to the conclusion that nobody would hear it. I think that most people who aren’t paying attention to this issue are avoiding the news altogether right now. Also, there are some things worth saying about it — and a lot of things not worth saying, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. So for the second week in a row I’m going to take the name of this blog seriously and do some sifting: The voices you should hear are already out there, for the most part. I just need to collect and annotate.
I’m not sure how long that’s going to take. I’m guessing I’ll have an article out by 10 and a weekly summary by noon or so, but I don’t really know.
It’s not that Trump is saying things he believes to be false. It’s that he doesn’t seem to have beliefs at all, not in the way people typically talk about beliefs — as mental constructs stable across time and context. Rather, his opinions dissolve and coalesce fluidly, as he’s talking, like oil on shallow water. That’s why he gives every indication of conviction, even when, say, denying that he has said something that is still posted on his Twitter feed, or denying that he said something that he in fact said on live television, in front of millions of people, just minutes earlier.
This week everybody was talking about the Clinton/Trump debate (and Miss Universe 1996)
A week ago, the polls looked like a dead heat, and the momentum was still with Trump. Last Monday’s debate seems to have changed that dynamic. But not because we learned anything new about the candidates’ philosophies or programs.
I’m not even sure it was the debate itself that moved the polls. Sure, Clinton did look sharper and Trump made mistakes. But the more serious problem for Trump came afterwards. He spent the rest of the week off-message, overcome by his inability to let go of any argument that he’s not winning. All week he’s been proving the truth of what Clinton said in her convention speech:
A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.
First, there was the Miss Universe flap. Josh Marshall pointed out how easily Trump could have stepped around the whole issue.
Anyone with the most basic communications experience or simply a conscience knows there’s a simple and solitary way to deal with something like this: “We quarreled years ago. I’m sorry we did. That’s a long time ago. I wish her the best.” Done and done.
But no. As with the Khan family, Trump took the attack personally and couldn’t let it go. Someone had implied he did something wrong, and he never does anything wrong.
He was still fuming in the wee hours of Friday morning. Clinton described this as “unhinged, even for him. Really, who gets up at 3 o’clock in the morning to engage in a Twitter attack against a former Miss Universe?” And Elizabeth Warren chimed in, tweeting at Trump: “You never tweet at 3am with ways to create new jobs for workers or hold Wall Street accountable.”
So does insulting a young woman 20 years ago mean Trump should never be president? No. It may not cast him in a positive light, but it’s a minor event far in the past. Does his reaction this week prove Clinton’s point that he is “temperamentally unfit” for the presidency? Yes it does. Ezra Klein did the best job of explaining why: Hillary set a trap for him and he has spent a week flailing in it. If he were president, ISIS and Russia and China could do the same thing.
The problem is that Trump is predictable and controllable. … As unpredictable and uncontrollable as he is to his allies, he is exactly that predictable and controllable to his enemies, and to America’s enemies.
Trump made two other unforced errors: He said “That makes me smart” when Clinton suggested he hadn’t paid any income tax. Ross Rosenfeld responded in The Hill:
I guess the rest of us are just stupid because we have to pay taxes. If only my daddy had left me a real estate empire, a host of political and financial connections, and no morals whatsoever — then I, too, could be “smart” like Donald Trump.
Somebody who’s been very vicious to me, Rosie O’Donnell, I said very tough things to her, and I think everybody would agree that she deserves it, and nobody feels sorry for her.
Lawrence O’Donnell said what I was thinking: “She deserves it. That is what every man guilty of spousal abuse always thinks.” So what exactly did Rosie do to deserve being called “disgusting” and “a fat pig”? She made fun of Trump on TV ten years ago. He can’t let it go.
The claim that Trump pays no taxes might be true, at least for a long stretch of years. The New York Times got hold of a few pages of Trump’s state and local income tax returns from 1995. They show Trump declared a huge loss, presumably on the collapse of his Atlantic City casinos.
Tax experts hired by The Times to analyze Mr. Trump’s 1995 records said that tax rules especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period.
I feel like this is half a story, and I hope we see the other half before we vote. Unanswered questions: Is that loss real, or the product of creative tax accounting? Did he in fact use it to pay no taxes in subsequent years?
Trump once again used that I-could-talk-about-your-mama-but-I-won’t tactic that we all remember from fourth-grade recess. (Build your vocabulary: The technical name for this is apophasis.) Even more immature is that both he and his son Eric expect credit for not bringing up what they just brought up by talking about how they weren’t going to bring it up.
If Trump starts the conversation about Bill Clinton’s infidelity, here’s how it ends: Chelsea Clinton explains on TV how grateful she is that her parents held their marriage together, so she didn’t have to go through a divorce at age 7 like poor Eric Trump did.
and there were some unusual newspaper endorsements
But The Arizona Republic had never endorsed a Democrat in its 126-year history, until Tuesday.
Clinton has the temperament and experience to be president. Donald Trump does not.
USA Today also has never endorsed a presidential candidate, and it still hasn’t, exactly. But it did take a side. Its Editorial Board “does not have a consensus for a Clinton endorsement.” But the Board could agree on this:
This year, the choice isn’t between two capable major party nominees who happen to have significant ideological differences. This year, one of the candidates — Republican nominee Donald Trump — is, by unanimous consensus of the Editorial Board, unfit for the presidency.
The Cincinnati Enquirer has “supported Republicans for president for almost a century”, but this time it says
Clinton is a known commodity with a proven track record of governing. … Trump is a clear and present danger to our country.
The Dallas Morning News last endorsed a Democrat for president “before World War II”, but this time it says
There is only one serious candidate on the presidential ballot in November. We recommend Hillary Clinton.
Along the same lines, the NYT’s Ross Douthat also makes the conservative case against Trump:
Set aside for a moment Trump’s low character, his penchant for inflaming racial tensions, his personal corruptions. Assume for the sake of argument that all that can be folded into a “lesser of two evils” case.
What remains is this question: Can Donald Trump actually execute the basic duties of the presidency? Is there any way that his administration won’t be a flaming train wreck from the start? Is there any possibility that he’ll be levelheaded in a crisis — be it another 9/11 or financial meltdown, or any of the lesser-but-still-severe challenges that presidents reliably face?
I think we have seen enough from his campaign — up to and including his wretchedly stupid conduct since the first debate — to answer confidently, “No.” Trump’s zest for self-sabotage, his wild swings, his inability to delegate or take advice, are not mere flaws; they are defining characteristics. The burdens of the presidency will leave him permanently maddened, perpetually undone.
and Congress avoided another government shutdown
The new federal fiscal year began Saturday. Wednesday, Congress avoided a shutdown by passing a bill to fund operations through December 9. Republicans gave in to Democratic spending requests on issues that really shouldn’t be controversial or partisan: Flint’s water crisis, the Zika virus, and opiod addiction. Money related to the Louisiana floods was also in the bill. Democrats didn’t get everything they wanted though: the SEC still can’t take “action to increase transparency in public companies’ political spending”.
Not so long ago, we all took for granted that Congress would figure out some way to keep the lights on. Now it’s considered an accomplishment.
but Obama suffered his first veto override
This is kind of an odd story. Some families of 9-11 victims would like to sue Saudi Arabia for its alleged role in the attack. The problem is a legal principle known as sovereign immunity, which prevents people from suing foreign governments. Recently, Congress passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism bill to allow these suits. President Obama vetoed it, and Congress just overrode his veto, making the bill a law.
Overriding a veto takes a 2/3 votes in each house, so Republicans couldn’t do this by themselves. Apparently, congressional Democrats decided that opposing 9-11 victims right before an election was too politically dangerous, so most of them supported the override.
The problem is that when you take some action against a foreign government, it can respond. So Saudi Arabia, or maybe other countries, might start allowing their citizens to sue the U.S. for the damages we cause. This could result in the kind of huge mess that sovereign immunity is supposed to avoid.
So now congressional leaders are having second thoughts about what they’ve done, and Republicans are blaming President Obama for reasons that really defy analysis. Mitch McConnell said:
Because everyone was aware who the potential beneficiaries were, but nobody focused on the potential downside in terms of our international relationships. And I just think it was a ball dropped. I wish the President — and I hate to blame everything on him and I don’t — but it would have been helpful had … we had a discussion about this much earlier than the last week.
Because expecting Congress to do its own research into the consequences of its actions is setting the bar way too high. And McConnell listens so well when Obama tries to tell him something.
and you also might be interested in
Shimon Peres died. At 93, Peres was described as the “last link to Israel’s founding generation“. Because of that symbolic role, the articles this week about his death and career often say as much about the author’s attitude towards Israel and its current politics as about Peres.
Roberts’ claim is that people use language in two sometimes-conflicting ways: to communicate ideas and to position themselves in the social hierarchy. But Trump is almost always focused on the second purpose. The reason it is so frustrating to discuss the content of Trump’s statements is that most of them were not intended to have content: They are pure maneuvers for dominance.
This point helps explain why Trump cannot ever admit a mistake or an error. He can only process accusations — of dishonesty, of cruelty — as social gambits, not as factual claims. To him, the demand that he apologize or admit error is nothing more than a dominance play. Apologizing is losing. …
It helps explain why Trump has such a long and rich history of defrauding investors, refusing to pay contractors, using his charitable foundation as a piggybank, and declaring bankruptcy to escape debt. Contracts and promises are just plays in the game, not words that carry meanings or create obligations. You sign them or say them when you need to, to win whatever negotiation you are in, and then they are gone like smoke.
Usually we only talk about needlessly aggressive police tactics when someone winds up dead, but here are twovideos of the kinds of interactions that might be happening every day without making headlines.
Calling attention to stuff like this is sometimes labeled as “anti-police”. But that’s not it. There is good policing and bad policing. You can be against bad policing without being anti-police.
and believe it or not, I decided to cut Gary Johnson some slack
This week Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson had what he described as another “Aleppo moment“: asked by Chris Matthews to name a foreign leader he admired, he couldn’t come up with a name without the help of his VP, Bill Weld. It looked like he had no idea who else belongs to the world-leader club he wants to join.
I was ready to ridicule him over this, when I noticed that I can’t list a lot of world leaders either. What’s the name of the British woman who came into office after Brexit? Who’s leading France? Spain? Italy? India? China? Iran? Iraq? Anywhere in Africa? Who’s heads the junta that took over Egypt a few years ago? I’d have to look all that up.
If you’re under 30, or maybe 40, you’ve lived your adult life in an era when the news media doesn’t bother much with other countries, so you may take this kind of ignorance for granted. Maintaining a far-flung network of foreign correspondents is expensive, and the economics of the news business has gotten harsher, so for decades we’ve gradually gotten less and less international news. Most of the coverage we do get is shallower, the kind you can do by pulling video of some disaster off the internet and narrating it from New York or London.
It’s all happened so gradually that the result is hard to notice, until something like the Johnson incident happens. But I’m about to turn 60, so I remember an era when the leaders of major countries were household names: Maggie Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand, Indira Gandhi, Willy Brandt, King (not Saddam) Hussein, Franco, Begin, Sadat, and so on. When I was a kid, Mad Magazine sometimes made fun of French President Charles de Gaulle, because of course their core audience of teens and tweens would know enough about him to get the joke.
As a society, we never talked it over and decided to become this ignorant of foreign affairs. It’s just one of those self-reinforcing cycles market economies are prone to: The less you know, the less you wonder. It never occurs to us to ask why we don’t know what we don’t know.
and let’s close with an ordinary person’s act of kindness and courage
Introduction: Why we need reporters to investigate Trump
Typically, voters judge a candidate on three scales:
character or public image. Do we like this person, identify with him or her, and trust this candidate to understand our lives and our problems?
philosophy or policy. Do we agree with what the candidate proposes to do? Do we trust his or her overall approach to governing, so that we have confidence in the candidate to handle problems we can’t foresee?
record in public office. Does he or she have a voting record in Congress that matches that professed philosophy and those policy proposals? Or experience running a state, a cabinet department, or a major city that demonstrates basic competence, expertise in major policy areas, or an understanding of how government works?
Occasionally a candidate passes these tests in some non-standard way. Dwight Eisenhower, for example, had never been elected to anything before running for president in 1952. But his experience as commander of the allied forces in Europe during World War II gave him defense and foreign policy experience, as well as proving that he could manage a large, complicated enterprise.
Donald Trump, though, is unique in that his claim to the presidency is based almost entirely on his character. He has no record in public office, and much of his record in business is closed to public examination.
But despite all that, he is Donald Trump. His name is on those big buildings. We’ve been seeing his picture on magazine covers and watching him on TV for decades. Unlike any previous presidential candidate, he is a brand. Attach Trump to something and our impression of it changes: Trump Tower, Trump Taj Mahal, Trump University.
So how does that translate to President Trump and the Trump administration?
Precisely because he is a brand, it can be hard to separate Donald Trump, the man and potential president, from the character Donald Trump we’ve seen on TV. Maybe they are the same, or maybe they are as different as Martin Sheen is from the President Bartlett character he played so convincingly on The West Wing. (Would Sheen react to a crisis as calmly and wisely as Bartlett did in scripts that Sheen had read and memorized before the cameras powered up? I have no idea, but I’d hate to bet my country on it.)
That’s why we need reporters to examine Trump, his life, and his record more than we’ve ever needed them to check out a candidate before. Most of the reporters who have written about Trump have not risen to that challenge. Some simply repeat his statements, or those of his campaign managers and surrogates, without bothering to find out what’s true or false. Others repeat scurrilous charges about him without gathering evidence to back them up. Neither of those kinds of articles is what we need.
What I’ve tried to assemble here is the best reporting about Trump, written by journalists who have taken the time and made the effort to investigate rather than simply call him names, or recite his legend, or psychoanalyze him, or navel-gaze to determine his historical significance. All in all, I think these investigations paint a devastating picture, but it is a portrait based in fact, rather than the fantasies of his political enemies.
Finally, a note because I’m sure someone will ask: I’m not including the NYT’s article Saturday about Trump’s taxes, because I don’t feel like we have the whole story yet. He could have avoided income taxes for 18 years, and he hasn’t denied the report, but we still can’t say that he definitely did. We also don’t know whether the $900 million loss in the story is real or the product of creative accounting. I have the feeling there’s another shoe that still needs to drop.
Also, there’s no Trump U story on the list, because there’s no singular article about it. Documents collected for the lawsuit against Trump were released to the public, and many news outlets covered what they said.
So here, in no particular order, are the best nine:
If Trump’s claim that he can be an effective president rests on his business record, that record deserves some scrutiny. Kurt Eichenwald explains:
Trump’s many misrepresentations of his successes and his failures matter—a lot. As a man who has never held so much as a city council seat, there is little voters can examine to determine if he is competent to hold office. He has no voting record and presents few details about specific policies. Instead, he sells himself as qualified to run the country because he is a businessman who knows how to get things done, and his financial dealings are the only part of his background available to assess his competence to lead the country. And while Trump has had a few successes in business, most of his ventures have been disasters.
The successes primarily come from the investments and contacts he inherited from his father, Fred Trump.
Trump boasted when he announced his candidacy last year that he had made his money “the old-fashioned way,” but he is no Bill Gates or Michael Bloomberg, self-made billionaires who were mavericks, innovators in their fields. Instead, the Republican nominee’s wealth is Daddy-made. Almost all of his best-known successes are attributable to family ties or money given to him by his father. … So to sum it all up, Trump is rich because he was born rich—and without his father repeatedly bailing him out, he would have likely filed for personal bankruptcy before he was 35.
His casinos went bankrupt. He bought Eastern Airlines and renamed it the Trump Shuttle before giving it to his creditors when he couldn’t pay its bills. Then he moved towards being a brand rather than a businessman.
Beginning in 2006, Trump decided to take a new direction and basically cut back on building in favor of selling his name. This led to what might be called his nonsense deals, with Trump slapping his name on everything but the sidewalk, hoping people would buy products just because of his brand.
Trump Mortgage started just in time to lose money in the real estate bubble. GoTrump.com failed as an online travel service. Trump Vodka. Trump Steaks. All failures.
But by licensing his brand to developers, and helping them use that magical name to convince middle-class people to make downpayments on condos that were never built, Trump managed to walk away with a profit on deals where everyone else lost: Trump Hollywood, Trump Ocean Resort Baha Mexico, Trump Tower Tampa. Finally, there is the outright fraud of Trump University.
But if he’s such a bad businessman, you might ask, why is he so rich? The answer is that no one knows how rich he actually is. He claims to be worth more than $10 billion, but refuses to release any information that might validate that. In reality, he may be worth little more than what his father left him.
One admirable thing about billionaires like Bill Gates or Sam Walton is that they made a lot of other people rich too. If you worked for Bill or Sam back in the day and kept your stock options, you’re probably a multi-millionaire now. But with Donald Trump the exact opposite is often true: Signing a contract with Trump has been a good way to go broke.
Steve Reilly goes through court records to document a pattern of lawsuits against Trump and his businesses.
The actions in total paint a portrait of Trump’s sprawling organization frequently failing to pay small businesses and individuals, then sometimes tying them up in court and other negotiations for years. In some cases, the Trump teams financially overpower and outlast much smaller opponents, draining their resources. Some just give up the fight, or settle for less; some have ended up in bankruptcy or out of business altogether.
In the individual cases, Trump’s lawyers usually claimed that the work was substandard in some way. But in the aggregate that suggests a different problem:
[T]he consistent circumstances laid out in those lawsuits and other non-payment claims raise questions about Trump’s judgment as a businessman, and as a potential commander in chief. The number of companies and others alleging he hasn’t paid suggests that either his companies have a poor track record hiring workers and assessing contractors, or that Trump businesses renege on contracts, refuse to pay, or consistently attempt to change payment terms after work is complete as is alleged in dozens of court cases.
The cases that produce a public record may be just the tip of an iceberg. No one knows how many short-changed contractors decided that taking whatever Trump offered in payment was better than fighting his lawyers.
Edward Friel, of the Philadelphia cabinetry company allegedly shortchanged for the casino work, hired a lawyer to sue for the money, said his son, Paul Friel. But the attorney advised him that the Trumps would drag the case out in court and legal fees would exceed what they’d recover.
The unpaid bill took a huge chunk out of the bottom line of the company that Edward ran to take care of his wife and five kids. “The worst part wasn’t dealing with the Trumps,” Paul Friel said. After standing up to Trump, Friel said the family struggled to get other casino work in Atlantic City. “There’s tons of these stories out there,” he said.
The Edward J. Friel Co. filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 5, 1989.
Says the founder’s grandson: “Trump hits everybody.”
Paul Friel tells a more detailed version of his family’s story in this video.
3. David Fahrenthold’s investigation of the Trump Foundation and Trump’s (lack of) charitable contributions
This isn’t just one article, but a body of work that has been unfolding in The Washington Post over months.
Throughout his career, Donald Trump has recognized the brand-building power of charity. One stereotypic image of rich people — particularly those who were born rich, as Trump was — is that they only care about themselves; they suck money out of society and give nothing back. But a wealthy heir or businessman can banish that image by announcing that he’s going to give big contributions to help veterans, or a children’s hospital, or some other worthy cause. Rather than a parasite, he looks like a saint.
So if you’re rich and worry about your image, generosity can be a good investment in public relations. But there’s one way to make it an even better investment: What if you could get all the publicity associated with big gifts, but not actually have to pony up any of your own money, or any money at all?
That seems to be what Trump has consistently done over the years: make well-publicized announcements of gifts that never actually materialize, or are paid for by someone else. In that sense, his gifts to charity are like his business dealings with contractors (described in the previous article); after he gets what he wants from the deal, the rest is negotiable.
In the course of the current campaign, Trump or his surrogates have talked about tens of millions of dollars or even more than $100 million that Trump has given away. Ordinarily when a campaign makes claims like that, they’re happy to provide the details, because it’s one more chance to focus a reporter’s attention on a story that makes their candidate look good. But when Fahrenthold pressed the Trump campaign for details about the $6 million Trump had supposedly raised for veterans groups (instead of attending a Republican debate where Megyn Kelly could have questioned him again), they were oddly unhelpful.
The real start of it was the fundraiser that Trump had for veterans in Iowa in late January. He said he’d raised $6 million — and then he toured around Iowa and New Hampshire handing out big novelty checks to local vets groups. But then Trump stopped. And he hadn’t given away anywhere near $6 million. That started us looking. We found that Trump seemed to have stockpiled a lot of the vets money in this oddball Trump Foundation, which had no staff and very little money. In fact, for a long time, it seemed the Trump Foundation had actually *made* money on the vets fundraiser, because it had given out far less than it had taken in from other donors (who expected it to quickly pass on their donations to vets groups).
The vets saga ended strangely: Trump’s people said he’d given the $1 million [which he personally pledged] secretly. We checked. That was false. Trump hadn’t given the $1M away at all. Then, he finally did, in the middle of the night. Then Trump held an angry press conference where he denounced the media for, in effect, forcing him to explain what he’d done with the money other people had entrusted to him, the money in the Trump Foundation. That made us more interested.
For any other candidate, you could just check Schedule A of his or her tax return. But Trump won’t release his tax returns either. If Trump wouldn’t provide any details, though, maybe the charities would. So Fahrenthold started contacting charities that Trump had some connection to, then branching out from there. He found very little. Only in the last few months — after Fahrenthold started checking up on him — has Trump started giving money to charity again.
And then there’s the Trump Foundation. Since 2008, Trump has put virtually none of his own money into his foundation. (Over the previous 20 years, he donated a total of $5.4 million, not “tens of millions”.) Instead, he has collected contributions from other people and corporations, and has spent a lot of it on himself or his business interests. He used hundreds of thousands from the foundation to make charitable contributions that settled court cases against himself or his companies. (That’s illegal.) He used $30K to buy two portraits of himself in charity auctions. (Trump’s people won’t say where the paintings are, but one or maybe both are hanging in Trump businesses. If so, if the portraits weren’t themselves used for some charitable purpose, that also is illegal.)
Donald Trump’s charitable foundation — which has been sustained for years by donors outside the Trump family — has never obtained the certification that New York requires before charities can solicit money from the public, according to the state attorney general’s office.
… The most important consequence of not registering under the more rigorous “7A” level was that the Trump Foundation was not required by the state to submit to an annual audit by outside accountants. In such an audit, charity-law experts said, the accountants might have checked the Trump Foundation’s books — comparing its records with its outgoing checks, and asking whether the foundation had engaged in any transactions that benefited Trump or his businesses.
In recent years, The Post has reported, Trump’s foundation does appear to have violated tax laws in several instances.
More disturbing yet is the appearance that he has used money from the Trump Foundation to squash fraud investigations into Trump University. He has paid a $2,500 fine for the Foundation making a $25,000 contribution to a PAC supporting Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who coincidentally decided not to investigate Trump U. This would fit a larger pattern. Trump gave $35K of his own money to Texas AG (now Governor) Greg Abbott, who also didn’t investigate Trump U. And the Trump Foundation contributed $100K to another foundation that is suing New York AG Eric Schneiderman, who is suing Trump U for fraud.
In short, for the last 8 years or so, up until the last few months, Trump not only wasn’t giving to charity, he was using other people’s charitable contributions to benefit himself. Campaign manager Kellyanne Conway justified this by claiming — falsely — that the Foundations money “is his money”. The whole point of giving money to a foundation, or any charity, is that it’s not your money any more. And when the Foundation is under your control but is funded primarily by other people, then it’s really not your money.
Fact-checking sites have some leeway about which statements they check, so small differences in the aggregate statistics don’t necessarily mean anything. But Donald Trump’s file is unique: 35% of his checked statements are rated False, and another 18% get the even lower Pants On Fire rating, which is reserved for statements that “make a ridiculous claim“. By a wide margin, no other major political figure so regularly says things that are provably not true. (So much for the claim that he “tells it like it is”.)
In 1998, it briefly looked like the U.S. embargo against Cuba might come down. If it did, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts wanted to be ready to move in fast. So it sent somebody to Havana to investigate the business possibilities. That in itself violated the embargo.
This is Fahrenthold again, this time teaming with Robert O’Harrow Jr. The question in this article is Trump’s honesty, and the unique opportunity to compare what he said while under oath in 2007 to what he had previously claimed when not under oath.
In Trump Nation: the art of being the Donald author Timothy O’Brien estimated Trump’s net worth at less than $250 million, rather than the $5 billion he then claimed, and made several other statements Trump was offended by. So he sued. Big mistake.
By filing suit, Trump hadn’t just opened himself up to questioning — he had opened a door into the opaque and secretive company he ran. … The reporter’s attorneys turned the tables and brought Trump in for a deposition. For two straight days, they asked Trump question after question that touched on the same theme: Trump’s honesty.
The upshot is that Trump isn’t very honest, and tells a different story under oath than he does otherwise. Thirty times, they forced an admission that what he had said previously was not true. When not under threat of perjury, Trump exaggerated his success, quoted numbers he knew to be wrong, blamed other people for his mistakes, and “made authoritative-sounding statements without any proof behind them.” Under oath, he had to back off.
The article makes me wish Trump were speaking under oath now. BTW, Trump’s suit against O’Brien was dismissed, and the author he hoped to ruin had his legal fees picked up by his publisher.
In 1973, Donald Trump was still learning the real estate business from his father Fred. They were both sued by the Department of Justice for violations of the Fair Housing Act.
According to the DOJ, a former super at Trump’s Highlander complex claimed that he would also attach a coded piece of paper to let the “central office” know that an applicant was black. He added that a number of supers in Queens used a “phony lease” to enable them to refuse apartments to people of color. The super’s assistant backed up his story about the code and said she was told, “Trump Management tries not to rent to black persons.”
… In its lawsuit, the DOJ listed more than half a dozen cases in which a black person would try to rent an apartment at a Trump-owned building and would be denied; but when a white person—often a “tester” from New York’s Urban League—would inquire about vacancies, they would allegedly get offered an apartment in the same building.
The Trumps settled with DOJ in 1975, but by 1978 DOJ had them back in court for non-compliance with the consent decree. Reporter Gideon Resnick concludes: “the ugly details of this early clash with the Department of Justice shed light on alleged systemic discrimination at the heart of the Trump real estate empire.”
Trump’s public interactions with women have gotten a lot of attention, from decades ago to this week’s continuation of his feud with a former Miss Universe. But The Times Michael Barbaro and Megan Twohey tried to find out what it was like for a woman to deal with Trump one-on-one, in private. So they interviewed dozens of women who had known him over the years.
The picture they paint is complex and fascinating. His father Fred comes off as a classic sexist, and Donald revolted against him by promoting women to prominent roles in his businesses. But Donald also carried forward other parts of the sexist paradigm:
He simultaneously nurtured women’s careers and mocked their physical appearance. “You like your candy,” he told an overweight female executive who oversaw the construction of his headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. He could be lewd one moment and gentlemanly the next. … [I]n many cases there was an unmistakable dynamic at play: Mr. Trump had the power, and the women did not. He had celebrity. He had wealth. He had connections. Even after he had behaved crudely toward them, some of the women sought his assistance with their careers or remained by his side.
Kurt Eichenwald describes the impossibility of disentangling the Trump Organization from its “deep ties to global financiers, foreign politicians and even criminals”.
If Trump moves into the White House and his family continues to receive any benefit from the company, during or even after his presidency, almost every foreign policy decision he makes will raise serious conflicts of interest and ethical quagmires.
In the earlier Eichenwald article, he explained how Trump’s business strategy changed in 2007, when he began his TV career and decided to profit from fame and branding rather than building.
Rather than constructing Trump’s own hotels, office towers and other buildings, much of his business involved striking deals with overseas developers who pay his company for the right to slap his name on their buildings.
The problem is that these local partners are often deeply (and sometimes corruptly) involved with local politicians and political parties, or have financial interests in the local defense industries. (Eichenwald cites examples from Russia, Ukraine, South Korea, India, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Libya, and other countries.) Even if there is no corrupt intent on Trump’s part, his political decisions will affect his financial interests.
If he plays tough with India, will the government assume it has to clear the way for projects in that “aggressive pipeline” [of Trump Organization projects in that country] and kill the investigations involving Trump’s Pune partners? And if Trump takes a hard line with Pakistan, will it be for America’s strategic interests or to appease Indian government officials who might jeopardize his profits from Trump Towers Pune?
A conflict over a Trump property in Dubai led to a Twitter-feud between Trump a Saudi prince, whom he called “Dopey Prince @Alwaleed_Talal”. If he were president, it’s hard to see how this wouldn’t become problem between the two countries.
Sovereign wealth funds, which invest the money accumulated by oil-rich governments, sometimes make financial deals with the Trump Organization. In Azerbaijan, the Trump Organization partners with a company controlled by the son of the transportation minister, who might have laundered money for the Iranians.
Trump has said he will deal with these problems by turning the business over to his children while he is in office. This might work if the business were something simple and small, like a restaurant or a hardware store. But how can he avoid knowing whether a Trump Tower gets built in some foreign capital? Or not hear when a Saudi prince or Russian oligarch threatens to cancel a loan?
Most of what we hear about Donald Trump is meant to enrage or energize us rather than inform us. Every day, newspapers are full of articles about Trump, what he said, what somebody said about him, and so on. Almost every day, you can see part a Trump rally on a cable news channel, or listen to a panel of pundits discuss him. Despite all that coverage, though, we seldom learn anything new or significant about him.
But now and then, an article actually tells us something important. Some reporter took his job seriously, did some real investigating, and found something voters should know about. Not opinion or speculation or psychoanalysis, just facts put into a context. Usually such articles get attention for a day or two before getting swamped by coverage of Trump insulting somebody or saying a bad word.
I decided to collect them. So this week’s featured post is “Investigative Reporters and Donald Trump: the 10 Best Articles”. If you want to know how Trump runs his businesses, what the Trump Foundation controversy is about, what conflicts of interest a President Trump will face, and so on, this will be a good place to start. That should be out between 9 and 10 EDT.
The news this week was also dominated by the campaign: fallout from the debate, a list of ordinarily reliable Republican newspapers deciding not to endorse Trump, and so on. But some other things happened as well: Shimon Peres died. Congress avoided a government shutdown, then overrode an Obama veto before immediately regretting it (and blaming Obama). Gary Johnson had another “Aleppo moment”, but I decided it says more about what’s been happening to American journalism than about him. And the weekly summary will close with an act of everyday heroism. That should be out maybe around 11.
It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.
And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.
Some quick thoughts about the quote above: King gave this speech three weeks before his assassination, so it is very close to his last word on the subject. Such radical King quotes have largely been white-washed out of history. Instead, each January MLK Day is largely a celebration of color-blindness, as if the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and sundown towns could just be waved off, and we could best move forward by pretending that none of it ever happened. King himself never held that view, as you will quickly see if you read entire speeches rather than a few carefully selected lines.
This week everybody was talking about Charlotte
Since the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott on Tuesday, Charlotte North Carolina has seen daily demonstrations. The demonstrations appear to have been mostly peaceful, but occasionally turned violent. One person was shot and eventually died, but police claim they didn’t do it and no one seems to know who did. I haven’t seen anything about whether the dead man was a protester.
To me, there seem to be two issues related to police killing blacks. First, the black community has no confidence in the investigative process, and I can understand why. Take the Freddie Gray case, for example. He was apparently healthy when Baltimore Police took him into custody, and then he died of a spinal cord injury. No one seems to be at fault; every charge has resulted in a not-guilty verdict. And in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, the police seemed more interested in doing public relations for Officer Wilson than a neutral investigation.
There’s at least a partial a solution to this part of the problem, and it’s already law in Wisconsin: any police shooting requires an outside investigation; a police department can’t be allowed to investigate its own officer.
Second, American police tactics are senselessly confrontational. Even in shootings that are judged to be justified, I’m often left wondering: “Did you really need to push it to that point?” Standard practice seems to be to start by barking orders, and then to keep escalating until either the orders are followed or the civilian is dead. That’s what I see in the Scott video. In many other cases, people wind up dead because police don’t understand they’re dealing with someone who is deaf or mentally handicapped or otherwise incapable of understanding their demands.
While we’re talking about black lives not mattering, conservative columnist Glenn Reynolds tweeted “Run them down” in response to protesters who blocked an interstate in Charlotte. He then defended the tweet on his Instapundit blog. Twitter suspended his account for promoting violence, and USA Today suspended him as a columnist for a month.
If you think this isn’t about race, imagine, say, white Catholics blocking a road leading to an abortion clinic. Would anybody suggest running over them?
and tonight’s presidential debate
Like Frank Bruni, my main worry about the debate is that the bar for Trump has been set so low. If he makes it through the evening without calling Hillary a bitch or talking about his penis again, lots of people will be impressed by his performance. I remember the first 2000 debate, when Gore ran rings around Bush on substance, but the headlines the next morning were that Gore sighed too loudly.
One measure of what Hillary is up against is just how contradictory or constricting all the “expert” advice is: She shouldn’t raise her voice or interrupt Trump. She should keep her answers short, but tell her own story and project a positive vision. Point out when he’s lying but don’t get mired in fact-checking. Show her intelligence and reveal his ignorance without sounding like a know-it-all. Either do or don’t talk about the specifics of her plans for governing. And brush off his attacks as silly.
And then there’s sexism. A woman can’t possibly look “presidential”, because the American people have no image of a woman being president. And I can guarantee that tomorrow morning Trump will not be criticized for shouting, frowning, interrupting, dressing wrong, blustering, not showing proper respect, or any of the things Clinton has to be on guard against. Anna Waters, a Northwestern student who debated in high school, outlines all the built-in disadvantages female debaters have to overcome. Another high school debater complains about the challenge of “trying to both confront stereotypes but at the same time being weirdly beholden to them”.
and you might also be interested in
The National Museum of African-American History and Culture opened this week on the National Mall in Washington, DC.
John Oliver compares Hillary’s scandals to Trump’s in some detail, and then concludes:
This campaign has been dominated by scandals. But it is dangerous to think that there is an equal number on both sides. And you can be irritated by some of Hillary’s; that is understandable. But you should then be f**king outraged by Trump’s.
If you’ve been thinking that Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson represents the “good” side of conservatism, you might want to think again. When he was running for president as a Republican in the 2012 cycle, he brushed off any concern about global warming, arguing that “In billions of years, the sun is going to actually grow and encompass the Earth, right? So global warming is in our future.” He went on to call for building new coal-fired power plants.
In case the insanity of this remark isn’t already obvious to you, imagine applying the logic to other issues: There’s no point worrying about nuclear war, because the sun is eventually going to burn all our cities anyway. And after the solar catastrophe, who’s going to care what our national debt was?
Elizabeth Warren crossed the border to Nashua Saturday morning to give a pep talk to the door-knockers and phone-bankers gathered at the local Democratic headquarters. I had a chance to snap this picture.
She said she was going to talk about three things that are in danger in this election, but then she added a fourth. A Republican sweep in this election would result in
ending the Affordable Care Act and defunding Planned Parenthood
rolling back Dodd-Frank and the other Wall Street reforms that were passed after the 2008 collapse.
Donald Trump immediately appointing a Supreme Court justice.
“Donald Trump and the Republicans are making hate OK.”
Her summary of Democratic values was
Every young person is entitled to get an education without being crushed by debt.
No one who works full-time should live in poverty.
After a lifetime of hard work, people are entitled to retire in dignity.
“Let me say something that is deeply controversial in Republican circles: We believe in science, that climate change is real, and we have a moral obligation to pass on a livable Earth.”
Equal pay for equal work and a woman’s right to choose.
When Wall Street CEOs break the rules, they should go to jail like anyone else.
Money should not own our government.
Two sports legends worth remembering today: Golfer Arnold Palmer died yesterday at 87. He was part of that first generation of athletes that TV made into icons.
And Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully called his last game. Scully is 88, and has been announcing Dodger games on radio and TV since 1950, when they played in Brooklyn. The Dodgers gave him a great send-off: The final play he broadcast was a walk-off homer that clinched the division title.
and … and …
no, I just don’t have a closing in me this week. Let’s hope my sense of humor recovers soon.
The big debate in the Keith Lamont Scott shooting — the one that started the protests that have been going on in Charlotte since Tuesday — is whether or not Scott had a gun, and if so, whether it was in his hand. The police said he did and it was, though for days they refused to release video of the incident. [1]
The Scott shooting came a few days after police in Tulsa shot and killed another black man, Terrence Crutcher. But the Tulsa case was manslaughter, and a police officer has been charged, largely because Crutcher was unarmed. Even there, though, weaponry is an issue. (The officer claims Crutcher was reaching into his vehicle, and she feared he was reaching for a gun. But the video doesn’t corroborate that story.) Apparently she believed that if he might have been armed, shooting him dead would be an appropriate outcome.
Back in July another black man, Philandro Castile, was shot dead by a police officer during a traffic stop. Castile told the officer there was a gun in the car, which he had a permit to carry. His girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter were also in the car. The girlfriend claims Castile was reaching for his wallet when the officer shot him four times. So far, there have been no charges.
The NRA, an organization that exists to defend the rights of gun-owners, decided not to comment on the Castile shooting “while the investigation is ongoing”. My Google search for “NRA statement on Keith Lamont Scott” turned up nothing relevant, even though for days the only reason police gave for initiating the encounter was their belief that Scott was armed. (More recently, they elaborated that they also observed him rolling a cigarette which they believed to be marijuana.) North Carolina is an open-carry state, so having a firearm is not in itself a violation. [2]
So if you’re an organization working to make sure the government doesn’t hassle gun-owners exercising their Second Amendment rights, the initially available information in the Scott case would seem to be right up your alley.
Except that Scott is black. The NRA doesn’t do black. I mean, they will gladly let you join and accept your membership fees if you’re black, but don’t count on them to defend your Second Amendment rights. Because, well, what Second Amendment rights? There’s an asterisk on the Second Amendment. The Washington Post‘s Eugene Robinson reviews the facts of the Scott and Castile cases [3] and draws the obvious conclusion: “laws permitting people to carry handguns apparently do not apply to African Americans.”
If all they saw was a man with a gun who got out of a car and back in, what illegal activity did they observe? Why did they “approach the subject” instead of going about their business? Did they have any reason to suspect it was an illegal gun? Are all men carrying guns believed to be carrying guns illegally, or just black men? [4]
Cenk Uygar of The Young Turks noticed something similar, and brings up two other cases: Tamir Rice in Cleveland, the 12-year-old who was killed within seconds of police arriving despite the fact that his “gun” was a toy, and John Crawford III, who police killed in a Walmart near Dayton, because he also was carrying a toy gun which he apparently planned to buy. Like Rice, Crawford was shot within seconds after police arrived. Apparently, blacks with guns are so dangerous that police can’t be bothered to see whether they will drop them, or even to discover whether the guns are real at all.
That police behavior may be questionable, but it’s not obviously racist; maybe they’d be just as trigger-happy towards whites. But Uygar then shows three videos of cops patiently having conversations with uncooperative armed white men, none of whom wind up dead. In the last one, the man verbally abuses three policemen until they back away and leave him with his weapon. Uygar comments:
Yeah, that happens to black guys all the time in this country. Where they laugh at cops in their face and say, “See ya, tough guy. Walk away.” And the cops go, “OK, yes sir. You’re right, sir. You have constitutional rights, sir. Of course I’ll walk away.” … That happens all the time. No one, no one, I don’t care how right-wing you are, you don’t believe that. You know what they would have done if he was black.
Not that those uncooperative armed white men should be dead, but it shows that when white lives are at stake, police can be patient, carefully establish what is going on, and attempt to deescalate the confrontation. In one of Uygar’s examples, a clearly irrational white man goes to his car, gets his gun, and begins waving it in all directions, including pointing it at police. They attempt to talk to him, and when that doesn’t work, they fire one shot into his leg to drop him, rather than the 16 shots fired into Laquan McDonald in 15 seconds. He lives.
That’s why the movement is called Black Lives Matter. That guy’s life mattered to those cops. They didn’t want to end his life. They were careful with it. So we’re asking you to also be careful with black lives just as much.
The Second Amendment isn’t the only one with an asterisk: The Fourth Amendment has one too. [5] Without the asterisk, it reads like this:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
So when they talk about “probable cause” on NCIS, that’s not just some criminal-coddling nonsense made up by an activist liberal judge; it’s right there in the effing Constitution. The Constitution guarantees your right to be secure in your person, unless police have probable cause to believe you are involved in a crime.
In a pre-taped interview on Fox News scheduled to air Wednesday night, Trump was asked by an audience member what he would do to address “violence in the black community” and “black-on-black crime.” Trump responded by proposing that “stop-and-frisk” policing, in which an officer is empowered to stop an individual and frisk them for weapons or any other illegal contraband, be adopted nationwide.
If a weapon is found, it is confiscated. The next day Trump clarified, saying that he only meant Chicago.
I think Chicago needs stop-and-frisk,” Trump said. “Now, people can criticize me for that or people can say whatever they want, but they asked me about Chicago, and I think stop-and-frisk, with good, strong, you know, good, strong law and order. But you have to do something. It can’t continue the way it’s going.”
Trump says nothing specific about race, but does anyone really believe that he wants police to stand outside of Water Tower Place and frisk upscale white shoppers for weapons? Will they cruise the Magnificent Mile during lunch hour, stopping white lawyers and bankers at random to see if they have any cocaine? (Sometimes they do.) Of course not. What will substitute for “probable cause” is that you are a young black man [6] wandering around in a poor, majority-black neighborhood.
You still might claim that the bias here is related to class, not race. But seriously, can you picture police cruising the trailer parks of Louisiana, frisking white good old boys and confiscating guns from Duck Dynasty types? Could that ever happen?
Of course not. The NRA would throw a fit.
[1] Saturday they finally did. The New York Times assessment: “It appeared from the two angles that he had nothing in his right hand. It was unclear what, if anything, Mr. Scott, who was right-handed, had in his left hand.” In the video, you can hear police repeatedly telling Scott to drop the gun. But in another video, you can hear Scott’s wife protesting that he didn’t have a weapon.
[2] It turns out that Scott didn’t have a right to carry a firearm, since he had a gun-related prior offense. But it’s almost certain police didn’t know that when they approached him.
[3] As they were known on Thursday, before the marijuana claim about Scott.
[4] Robinson’s conclusion is less compelling if the marijuana claim is true. But even then, we’re left with the question: What public danger required escalating the encounter to the point of death?
[5] If I wanted to expand the scope of this article, we could also talk about the “except when Muslim” asterisk on the First Amendment. Americans have a right to practice their religion, except when they want to build a mosque somewhere and Christians object. And the whole gay-marriage issue revolved around the “except when gay” asterisk on the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
[6] In the New York City example Trump cited, Latinos were also disproportionately targeted.
If endangered people are nothing more than tiny candies, trying to save them just seems stupid.
It’s been a while since I’ve talked about framing. In a nutshell, the idea is that people think in metaphors, so if you can influence the metaphor people use to think about some situation, you can shape their thinking about it, possibly without them even realizing it. For example, someone who thinks in terms of a war on drugs will come up with different proposals than someone who is thinking about addiction as an illness. So if you suggest one metaphor or the other with the phrasing of your question, you can change the odds on getting the answer you want.
Like any other communication tactic, framing can be used for good or ill. If you’re teaching, a good metaphor can stick in students’ heads better than a long explanation. And if a metaphor is apt, it can make obvious some connections that might otherwise be confusing. (One of my favorites when I was teaching math was to encourage students to think of mathematics as a language and equations as sentences in that language. Then it becomes obvious that first step in solving any word problem is to translate the paragraph from sentences-in-English to sentences-in-mathematics.)
One uncontroversial metaphor that just about everyone uses (usually without thinking about it) is to talk about life as a journey: We come to forks in the road, the path can be rocky or smooth, two people have a parting of the ways, and so on. We all do this because (1) we’re used to it, and (2) it’s convenient. It’s actually kind of difficult to talk about long-term life issues without using a journey metaphor somehow.
But metaphors also tilt our thinking. The life-is-a-journey metaphor, for example, tilts us towards belief in an afterlife, because journeys have destinations.
Using the wrong metaphor can make your thinking absurd, even if all the steps you take are logical within the frame. A lot of jokes are based on absurdities created by mis-framing some situation. (A comedian was in line at the supermarket behind somebody who was buying a single roll of toilet paper. “What?” he asked. “Are you trying to quit?” The question would make perfect sense if rolls of toilet paper were like packs of cigarettes.)
Metaphors become sinister when people create them in order to encourage and take advantage of these sorts of mistakes. A sinister metaphor can sneak in assumptions that would be either obviously false or too ugly to defend if they had to be explained explicitly.
This image says it all. Let’s end the politically correct agenda that doesn’t put America first. #trump2016
If you stay within the frame, the answer is obvious: Of course you wouldn’t eat a Skittle if there were any chance of getting a poisonous one.
But what assumptions has the Skittles metaphor tried to sneak past you? Implicitly, it says that the refugees themselves are of no consequence: Skittles are inanimate objects that have only momentary significance. The implication is that you might get a brief feeling of sweetness from the thought of rescuing some Syrian from ISIS, but nothing more.
If a few of the refugees become terrorists, though, that’s a huge deal. Because now we’re talking about our lives, not their lives. And because we are Americans, our lives are very, very much more important than theirs. Vox sums up:
The only agenda that will “put America first,” according to Trump, is one that assumes even a tiny risk to Americans outweighs every other consideration. It’s a policy that assumes Americans’ lives are infinitely precious and that Syrians might as well be Skittles, abstract pieces in a calculation of risk.
It’s worth considering how badly this frame clashes with Americans’ self-image as a heroic people. In all our wars (at least since we were “keeping the world safe for democracy” in World War I), we’ve recruited with the idea that our soldiers and sailors risk their lives to save others. The young men and women who have felt that heroic impulse — were they just stupid?
Also, consider the phrase “Syrian refugee problem”. Again, they’re not people, they’re a problem. And this is where you should start noticing that you’ve seen this frame before. Chris Hayes gives you a big hint.
swap in “Jews” for everything Trump and Co says about refugees, Muslims and immigrants it’s immediately clear what they’re doing.
That’s the model for this kind of propaganda: Germany didn’t have Jewish citizens or residents, it had a “Jewish problem“. So the Nazis weren’t abusing people, they were trying to solve a national problem. (No wonder they eventually they came up with a final solution.) They had a poisonous food metaphor too, but it wasn’t candies, it was mushrooms. Nazi writer Julius Streicher (who would be hanged at Nuremberg in 1946) published it in 1938 in a children’s book called The Toadstool.
Just as a single poisonous mushrooms can kill a whole family, so a solitary Jew can destroy a whole village, a whole city, even an entire Volk.
When you understand what has been left out of a metaphor or hidden by it, sometimes you can put it back in. That’s what Eli Bosnick did in a Facebook post that (last time I checked) had been shared 47,000 times. He brought back the point of taking in refugees: Quite likely, you are saving their lives. If every Skittle you eat saves a life, then the calculation changes for everybody with even the slightest amount of heroism in their souls.
I would GORGE myself on skittles. I would eat every single fucking skittle I could find. I would STUFF myself with skittles. And when I found the poison skittle and died I would make sure to leave behind a legacy of children and of friends who also ate skittle after skittle until there were no skittles to be eaten. And each person who found the poison skittle we would weep for. We would weep for their loss, for their sacrifice, and for the fact that they did not let themselves succumb to fear but made the world a better place by eating skittles.
That’s what heroic people do. I don’t know if I have that much heroism in me, to gorge with the knowledge that it would probably kill me, but be worth it in the larger scheme of things. Even so, though, I also don’t think I could just pass the bowl to the next person and say “No thanks.” I may not feel as heroic as Bosnick, but I also don’t think I have it in me to be that selfish.
Trump Jr. does, though. And when he looks at the rest of us, those who would eat at least two or three Skittles before passing the bowl along, he thinks we’re being stupid. What kind of idiot, after all, takes even a tiny risk to help others?
There are two featured posts this week. The first examines Donald Trump Jr.’s Skittles analogy in terms of some framing and propaganda notions I’ve discussed here before. Metaphors can make ideas clear, or they can hide assumptions you’d be revolted by if you had to think about them. This one hides revolting assumptions, and it’s related to a mushroom metaphor that comes from a revolting point in history. That article is basically done, so it should be out around 8 EDT.
The second featured post will be “The Asterisk in the Bill of Rights”. Rights that white people take for granted often become controversial when blacks try to claim them. It’s as if there were a hidden asterisk in the Bill of Rights that says “except when black”. So whites have a Second Amendment right to bear arms, but if you’re black and a cop sees your gun, he can justify killing you. Whites have a Fourth Amendment right not to be searched without probable cause, but in black neighborhoods police can stop and frisk people at their discretion. One federal judge said this is unconstitutional, but there is no nationwide precedent that stops the practice, and Trump just came out in favor of it. That should be out maybe by 10.
The weekly summary discusses the demonstrations in Charlotte, tonight’s presidential debate, my opportunity to see Elizabeth Warren Saturday morning, and a few other things. Expect it by noon.
Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday’s snow job becomes today’s sermon.
This week everybody was talking about where President Obama was born
Donald Trump’s first foray into national politics was in 2011, when he was the leading voice in the Birther movement, which charged that President Obama was an illegitimate president, because he wasn’t actually born in the United States. Trump often went even further, implying Obama’s whole history was phony.
Our current president came out of nowhere. Came out of nowhere. In fact, I’ll go a step further: the people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don’t know who he is. It’s crazy.
bring[ing] this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate. Mr. Trump did a great service to the President and the country by bringing closure to the issue that Hillary Clinton and her team first raised.
President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period. … Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it.
In other words, he withdrew his lie about Obama (without apology), and substituted a new lie about Clinton: She started it.
Both Politifact and FactCheck.org looked at the Clinton-was-a-birther claim in 2015 and rated it false. This week ABC and Politico reviewed the evidence and agreed.
Neither Clinton herself or anyone connected with her campaign ever raised the issue in public (unlike Trump who talked about virtually nothing else for six weeks in 2011). Some 2008 Clinton supporters discussed it on the internet, but this was a far more tenuous connection than the current one between Trump and white supremacists like David Duke; you can’t control who supports you or what they say. (Though you don’t have to retweet their racist comments.)
The birther issue is — rightly, I believe — characterized as racist, because there was never any reason to raise it other than a desire to disqualify Obama. This tactic has a long history: As soon as blacks start applying for a position, qualifications that had never before been an issue require documentation that whites have never needed to produce, and whatever documentation blacks produce is always deemed suspicious or unacceptable for some invented reason.
It’s disingenuous of Trump to take credit for the “closure” of Obama producing his birth certificate, when Trump himself continued to raise doubts after that. AP reports:
Trump repeatedly continued to question Obama’s birth in the years after the president released his birth certificate. In August 2012, for example, Trump was pushing the issue on Twitter.
“An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud,” he wrote.
Even in January of this year, Trump sounded skeptical when asked whether he now believed the president was a natural-born citizen.
“Who knows? Who cares right now? We’re talking about something else, OK?” Trump said in a CNN interview. “I mean, I have my own theory on Obama. Someday I’ll write a book.”
This often-repeated lie has had its effect: An August poll showed that 72% of Republicans still either denied that Obama was born in America or refused to take a position. Previous polls had shown that Trump supporters were more likely to be birthers than other Republicans.
I wonder how many of you are experiencing the same psychological symptom I’ve noticed in myself. Sometimes when people repress an emotion, they start experiencing themselves as the object of the emotion rather than the subject. So if you’re angry with somebody you don’t want to be angry with, like a boss or spouse, you instead believe that they’re angry with you. Jealous people imagine others are jealous of them, and so on. (The psychologists call this projection.)
The election is causing something similar in me: When I see evidence that large numbers of people are willing to make Trump our president, I feel deeply ashamed of my country and my fellow voters. But I try not to dwell on that, because what’s the point? Later on, though, I’ll notice that I’m feeling an excessive amount of shame for some comparatively trivial mistake of my own.
Anybody else noticing this? What kind of personal effect is the election having on you?
The first debate is just a week away. It will just be Clinton and Trump, since Jill Stein and Gary Johnson didn’t qualify. The moderator will be Lester Holt of NBC. Here’s the full calendar, with moderators.
This is not the time for a protest vote, in terms of a presidential campaign. I ran as a third-party candidate. I’m the longest-serving independent in the history of the United States Congress. I know more about third-party politics than anyone else in the Congress, okay? And if people want to run as third-party candidates, God bless them! Run for Congress. Run for governor. Run for state legislature. When we’re talking about president of the United States, in my own personal view, this is not time for a protest vote. This is time to elect Hillary Clinton and then work after the election to mobilize millions of people to make sure she can be the most progressive president she can be.
For most of her career, Hillary Clinton’s been measured in comparison to men. She is less warm and authentic than her husband Bill Clinton or her 2016 opponent Bernie Sanders; she is less eloquent and transcendent than her 2008 opponent Barack Obama.
But in what way, precisely, is Hillary Clinton “less” than Donald Trump?
He frequently looks gruff and mean. He barely laughs at all, and never at himself. His speeches are frequently dark and angry. He shouts. He’s condescending and never uplifting or inspirational. He brags.
If you actually subject Donald Trump to the same scrutiny Clinton receives, you’ll see that he doesn’t show any of the qualities that other politicians — and especially female politicians — are criticized for lacking.
And yet, while the content of his remarks is sometimes criticized, he escapes the constant style-heckling directed at Clinton.
The NYT’s Timothy Egan comments on the vast public under-reaction to Trump’s statement that we should have kept Iraq’s oil, because “to the victor belong the spoils”.
As with everything in Trump’s world, his solution is simple: loot and pilfer. “Take the oil,” said Trump. He was referring to Iraq, post-invasion. And how would he do this? There would be an open-ended occupation, as a sovereign nation’s oil was stolen from it. Of course, “you’d leave a certain group behind,” he said, to protect the petro thieves.
A certain group. Let’s be clear what he’s talking about: Under Trump’s plan, American men and women would die for oil, victims of endless rounds of lethal sabotage and terror strikes. That’s your certain group.
Another detail left out of Trump’s idea: It’s useless to take the oil unless you also control a corridor to the sea, so that you can export it. How big and how vulnerable would that occupation force be?
The story that Melania Trump came to America illegally seems to be based on bad reporting. I’m going to stop repeating it unless somebody comes up with better evidence, and I recommend the rest of you do the same.
but I decided to check in on the Islamic State
The featured post “ISIS is losing but what happens next?” reviews the military situation of the Islamic State, which is looking bad for them. But it also points out the limited goals that a military victory can win for us: As long as a disgruntled population feels alienated from a political solution, some of them are going to try force.
and the upbeat census report on income
For years, the story has been the same: The economy was growing, but wages — and particularly wages for the poor and working class — weren’t budging. But Tuesday, the Census Bureau released its annual report on income and poverty, updating its numbers for 2015. NPR summarizes:
after a brutal economic recession and years of stagnation, real median household incomes rose from $53,718 in 2014 to $56,516 last year. That’s a 5.2 percent rise — the first statistically significant increase since 2007.
That income statistic is still lower than it was in 2007, before the Great Recession, and its peak came in 1999, just before the Internet Bubble popped. But it least it seems headed in the right direction now. Also, poverty is down and more people have health insurance, particularly in the states that have expanded Medicaid the way the Affordable Care Act intended (until the Supreme Court struck that part down and gave states the option not to participate).
Matt Yglesias describes why he thinks the Census Bureau is measuring the wrong things, but thinks the ultimate result is that its report might be too pessimistic.
The ways in which the census’s data sets are flawed suggests the underlying reality might be even better than Tuesday’s rosy report suggested. But the uncertainty here should be acknowledged when we discuss the report.
Two of the flaws: Households are shrinking as more people live alone and there are fewer big families. So even a smaller household income might mean that individuals are doing better. (OTOH, if people want more children but can’t afford them, per capita numbers might make them look more prosperous than they feel.) Also, the Census Bureau focuses on income as cash before taxes. So changes in your non-cash benefits or your taxes don’t show up.
One resulting anomaly has been with us for decades: As the cost of health care rises, employers that provide health insurance see their cost-per-employee rise, but the employees don’t see any comparable increase in income.
and you also might be interested in
Nearly three months after the Brexit vote, what it means is still unclear. The UK still hasn’t invoked Article 50 of the EU charter, which would formally start a divorce process that must be over within two years. Prime Minister Theresa May — remember, she took office after David Cameron staked his career on the Brexit vote and lost — says that won’t happen at least until after the new year.
The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology is using its subpoena power to harass scientists whose results the Committee’s Republican majority and Republican chairman don’t like.
[Chairman Lamar] Smith’s subpoena-happy chairmanship hasn’t come out of nowhere. It apparently depends upon a conviction that the scientific community has a liberal agenda and that, if scientific results conflict with right-wing ideas, the scientists must be lying.
The new rules about House committees issuing subpoenas — written by the Republican majority in 2015 — make this kind of harassment easier.
The NRA is celebrating “a great day for freedom in Missouri”: a new gun law, passed over Governor Nixon’s veto, removes even the most common-sense restrictions:
Gun owners can carry concealed weapons anywhere that isn’t specifically restricted, like court houses and jails. No permits or training programs will be necessary. Just buy your gun (federal background checks still apply), put it in your pocket, and go on with your day.
Local police lose much of their ability to deny gun permits to high-risk individuals, like, say, people with a long history of domestic violence or suicide attempts.
A new stand-your-ground provision applies in public places like parking lots. If you feel threatened, you don’t have to retreat or otherwise avoid a confrontation. Just shoot your way out.
Kevin Ahlbrand, legislative director for the Missouri Fraternal Order of Police, raises a good question:
Our biggest fear is criminals who have not been convicted of a felony but are engaged in criminal activity will be legally carrying guns, and we’re now going to have to assume everyone is armed. When we show up to a scene and there are five guys with their guns out, what do we do?
An affordable medium-range electric car will be out later this year. It comes from one of those nimble, far-sighted little car companies — General Motors.
“Affordable” in this case is relative, of course. The Chevy Bolt EV (not to be confused with the Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid that been around since 2011), will sell for $30,000 or so after a federal rebate and go 238 miles on a charge. That’s still a significant chunk of change, but plug-in power is cheaper than gasoline, so the Bolt becomes a more reasonable investment after you factor in operating costs.
Electric-car pioneer Tesla also has a car coming out in the same cost range. It goes almost as far on a charge, but Tesla probably won’t be able to make enough of them to satisfy demand. GM will.
200 miles has long been considered a breakthrough point on electric cars, because that range wouldn’t crimp the style of the average American in day-to-day life. You’re still not going to take a Bolt on a cross-country road trip, but you should be able to commute to work, go out to lunch, and run errands after you get home without worrying about how much charge you have left.
In other car-tech news, Uber is testing driverless cars in Pittsburgh. A NYT reporter tells of his ride.
If driverless vehicles get perfected and accepted, we’ll see a new round of technological unemployment. I added up the employment numbers for the different types of drivers tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and got about 3.8 million. The total number of people employed in the U.S. is around 151 million. So we’re talking about 2.5% or so of all jobs. If you start thinking about people whose jobs depend on human drivers — say they work at truck stops or at motels in the middle of nowhere — the total goes higher.
That prospect got me reading Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, a 1952 dystopian vision of a low-employment society. That’s where I found this week’s opening quote.
and let’s close with a sharp contrast
Here’s Little Miss Flint’s reaction to meeting President Obama.
Aren’t you guys supposed to be religious? Naively, you might think that the people who would abandon Trump first over stuff like this would be the family-values folks, particularly evangelical Christians. But the reverse seems to be true: Even as elected Republicans head for the exits, evangelical leaders like Ralph Reed and Jerry Falwell Jr. are standing by Trump.
Elizabeth Warren crossed the border to Nashua Saturday morning to give a pep talk to the door-knockers and phone-bankers gathered at the local Democratic headquarters. I had a chance to snap this picture.
The Weekly Sift 