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loudlytransparenttrash · 7 years

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Hate crime hoaxes: This time let’s look at Black Lives Matter

Remember those three victimized black women who were assaulted and racially abused by a group of white men on a bus? Even Hillary Clinton and CNN were outraged at racist white guys and hundreds of BLM supporters protested. Lol it was a lie and the three women are being charged. Of course there’s silence.

Remember the black girl who was the victim of four white guys threatening to kill her and calling her a “black bitch” at a gas station? Huge lie.

Remember when some white racist Trump supporters left a racist note on the door of a black college student in Columbus which said, “We will kill you n****r”. Yep, another lie, he created it himself and he also fabricated several other hate-crime hoaxes to gain popularity.

Remember when a black guy was attacked by a white male who yelled he was going to be lynched because this is now “Trump Country”? It was a lie.

Remember when the young black guy was attacked by three white Trump supporters in an alley and broke his eye-socket and knocked out his teeth? It was a lie. He made up the story after losing a fight while he was drunk.

Remember when a 20 year old black woman was followed, attacked and robbed by two racist white guys? Yet another lie.

Remember when a black student running for president of student council received racist threats by white students demanding he drops out because he’s black? Lie.

Remember when KKK members held a meeting in the classroom of a university and the black student who reported it felt scared? She thought the cover on a projector was a KKK member.

Remember when two racist white Trump supporters spat on and racially abused black students after Trump won the election. Oh the lies.

Remember when a racist white student graffitied “Fuck n****s” along with “Hail the KKK” onto bathroom stalls? It was a lie.

Remember when black students were told that they’re all going to be killed tonight by a racist white guy? Lie. It was a black girl.

Remember when black students were told they’re all going to be shot on campus by a racist white potential school shooter? Lie. It was a black guy.

Remember when white Trump supporters burned down a Mississippi church and spray painted “Vote Trump” over its walls? It was a black guy.

Remember when KKK members left racist threatening messages targeting black men outside a black Colorado church? It was a black guy.

Remember when a white guy went on a graffiti rampage and wrote pro-Trump and anti-Semitic slurs throughout the neighborhood? It was a black guy.

Remember when a black waitress was a victim of a racist customer who didn’t tip her because she’s black? Another lie.

Remember when a black student was pushed down and attacked by a group of white guys who were chanting “Trump! Trump! Trump!” while attacking her? Yes it was a lie.

Remember when racist white Trump supporters displayed a sign saying “Hang a n***r from a tree” and social media had a complete meltdown? It was a black guy.

Remember when white Trump supporters threw a brick through a black person’s car and set it on fire? It was a black guy who was mad at his girlfriend.

Remember when those white students who drew a noose along with “N***r and White Power”? Another lie, it was black students.

Remember when students found KKK graffiti on campus and blamed white racist students for it? It was a lie.

Remember when those white neo-nazi Trump supporters toppled over 42 headstones at a Jewish cemetery? It was a lie.

Remember when that student posted about her encounter with a white male who had stopped her to tell her to go back to where she came from so she punched him in the throat and when his buddies saw she was winning the fight they came to his rescue but she was the only one arrested because of, ya know, racist cops? Lol of course it was a fucking lie.

As you can see, there’s not enough imaginary white neo-Nazi racists in America for them to be honest about their “oppression” so they have to either fabricate them or become them themselves to retain their Victim Status. They will stop at nothing to send the message that they are oppressed by white people, “look at all the white people abusing us and attacking us, now feel sorry for us and shut up so we can talk about how horrible white people are and we deserve reparations!”

Thank god for the police and paramedic reports to prove all of these hate crimes as hoaxes - just take a moment to think about the impact these are having on the way we perceive white men. These “violently racist and horrifying hate crimes committed by white men” are being spread all over the news, politics, social media and throughout our colleges but then when it comes out that they are fake, absolutely nobody mentions it so we continue to demonize white guys and apologize to and victimize “the victims”.

White men are already the toxic patriarchal privileged rapists, misogynist, violent and dangerous oppressors in the feminist world, responsible for everything that goes wrong in their lives - now they’re the racist, backwards privileged white supremacist oppressors hunting and attacking minorities, responsible for everything that goes wrong in their lives. We’ve only looked at a few hoaxes by just two of the left-wing groups and it’s quite disturbing to see them all target and attack one person and one person only. White males. Why do they do it?

These are just some of the false claims made mostly within the past year and they have all received nation-wide coverage and left-wing outrage and hysteria in mainstream media, social media and Hillary Clinton - all pushing the agenda that America is a racist hellhole and nobody except white people are safe so we need to coddle and give special treatment to those who are being oppressed by imaginary white oppressors.

All of these were hoaxes created by black people or crimes committed not by racist white guys but by other black people. They create these hoaxes mostly so they can justify protesting against police and our white president and to stop police investigating crimes committed by black people. The sad part is it actually works and the authorities fall for this virtually every time. Police have become afraid to do their jobs properly and the media are afraid to report the truth in the fear of sounding racist. As less police are willing to properly patrol black neighborhoods and are more wary to take action against black criminals, crime and murder is on the rise within these black communities.

In such a political and intellectual climate it shouldn't be all that surprising that racial hoaxes thrive on the nation's college and university campuses. Without lies, the left would have no recruiting tools. Make believe stories sell books and movie tickets and get people to volunteer their time for what they think is a worthy cause. Feminism especially thrives on this but so does BLM. They create racist white characters in a fabricated world of oppression because there’s not enough white racist males in the world to sustain their narrative and funding.

It’s about time we start calling out the lies and false claims made by leftist Muslims, feminists and black lives matter supporters, they all do it daily in an attempt to demonize the West, America, Trump and white people while they’re the ones doing the attacking against innocent white people, Trump supporters of any race or gender and just about anyone who doesn’t agree with them. Example, example, example, example, example, example, example, example, example, example, example, example.

Am I saying that there’s no racist white people? Of course not, but it ain’t the 30′s anymore and we all have equal rights. If they were being so badly and consistently oppressed and attacked by racist white males, why do they have to lie and fabricate so much oppression and attacks? Oh that’s right, because we don’t live in a racist, oppressive country - we don’t follow Sharia law. Obviously there’s racists of all colors and racism is still an issue but this needs to be addressed as adults. If we want to resolve real issues within the country, they first have to be real. They think they can say “yes we lied but...” No. You cannot lie and demonize an entire demographic of people and then expect the same people to listen to you, take you seriously and help you.

Despite the claims of BLM, black people aren’t being mercilessly hunted down by white people and there is no such thing as institutional racism. Is there racism? Yes. Is the left doing anything to ease it by calling one group racists and telling everyone else they can do no wrong? No. The sooner we can all be honest and prepared to scrutinize everyone regardless of race/gender/religion/sexual orientation, the sooner we can make a difference.

Now we’ve done Muslims and BLM, who’s next to expose fake hate crimes? LGBT? Hispanics? Feminists? White people with white guilt? There’s plenty to go around.

#black lives matter #anti blm #anti black lives matter #BLM #SJW #social justice #social justice warrior #anti sjw #blm1 #Donald Trump #Trump #racism

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lefishe · 5 years

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Trump is a genius

A genius??? What in gods name did you just say?

Ok hold on. First, uhh, hello again! Sorry I've been gone, been writing, but not on here. So I'd thought I'd pass by and show you what I've been up to! Here is an essay I wrote for my American Politics class which I think gives a very good overview of how Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. I hope you enjoy, and I've left all my sources at the end in case you need some more light reading. Enjoy these 4000 words, free of charge.

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The United States today finds itself in a position that it has never been in before. A country-wide sentiment of animosity, divide, and ultimately hate is one that is highlighted and propagated by the media worldwide. Although it may seem blown out of proportion in the eyes of foreigners, the division that is present in the socio-political world of the United States is one that goes far beyond the presidency that has taken the office by storm. Understanding the climate that the United States finds itself in today is a topic that one could analyze for an eternity but in the present time, it would be more effective to explain how we have gotten the presidency that we face today. Explaining how Donald J. Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race is a challenge that goes far beyond placing the result on good timing, the fragility of the party system, or the “culture of America”. To truly comprehend how Trump managed to sweep the election, a systematic, 3 pronged analysis can be conjured: how Trump managed to rise initially and in the Republican party, how he managed to defeat his Democratic counter Clinton, and how his personal character and philosophies took over America.

Born into a family of father Fred Trump, a real estate monster of New York, and starting off his path own path into the real estate world with an infamous loan of “1 million dollars” from his very father, Trump built his family name and Trump Organization into one plastered on hotels and towers, fueling his celebrity rise (BBC, 2017). From owning America’s favorite beauty pageants, creating his own shows, and writing books, Trump’s enterprises and hands in all markets of America brought him a net worth of over 3.5 billion, according to Forbes. As for how Trump got into politics, well his interests were rooted for a longer time than may be initially apparent. His first recorded interests started in 1987-1988, where his struggles with debt in his gambling enterprise branches put him off, until running as a Reform Party candidate in 2000, receiving 15000 votes in California’s Primary (CNN, 2018). His true involvement in politics did not flourish though until 2011-2012, where early primary polls saw Trump as the most popular candidate for the Republican Party, but regardless, in the end, he decided to give his endorsement to Mitt Romney. Throughout this election campaign, he also appeared as the new leader of the birther movement, a strong attack against President Obama and the country’s questioning of his actual birthplace (CNN, 2018). This, in addition to the taking over of the US Congress by the far-right Tea Party Movement, all culminated into the first clues of Trump’s path towards his political campaign of 2016. Making outrageous public claims on television, or otherwise, Trump began his populist movement then, and no one was realizing it. These steps all led to Trump first announcing his run for the US Presidency of 2016, where he first took over the Republican party.

On June 16th 2015, Trump officially announced his run for the presidency at his very own Trump Tower. His first speech, a foreshadowing to what was to come from his campaign, included his first talks of reforming the economy for the workers of America, the “made and bought in America” slogan, and his first mentions of a rigid immigration policy, going just as far as labelling Mexican immigrants as "They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some, I assume, are good people" (CNN, 2018). Trump set the tone early that he was not going to be like any old republican, or conservative nominee seen before, and his message sent waves across the US media, and through the existing base of the Republican Party. Running against a total of 17 candidates in the Republican Party primary nomination, including Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich as his biggest opponents, Trump went from the least favorable candidate, to gaining serious grounds over a 10 month period, winning first New Hampshire with 35% of the vote, followed by Pennsylvania and Delaware (Sarlin, 2016). During his rise to grander influence in the Republican Party, the “stop trump” movement was launched by a multitude of Republicans within the party at all levels, including his fellow opposition in the race to the primaries Jeb Bush, Kasich, and multiple other candidates, all portraying a deep divide in the party against Trump, many going as far as leaving completely.

The problem with the “stop trump” movement was that it was doomed to fail. Without a strong candidate in the primary ballot polls supporting it, most that endorsed the movement like Marco Rubio, were forced to resign without having a meaningful end to Trump’s dominance (Cassidy, 2016). In reality, Trump’s only real opposition was in the form of Senator Ted Cruz, who through his “extremism on social issues turning off many moderates and independents” (Cassidy, 2016), didn’t seem to grab a hold of the Republican voter base like Trump did. What Trump managed to do differently from his opposing candidates was his change in focus of Republican policy promises. Instead of targeting the middle-income whites of America and promising them policy changes that cut taxes for the richer, the following of more “laissez-faire” economics, and the usual Republican bases, he instead targeted the same people, but offered them immigration crackdowns, and a focus on policies helping the common American worker, that promised more safety and money in their pockets. Trump has essentially changed his message to appeal to the workers of America, seeing the advantages of a populist economic movement, and appealing to the grand majority of Republicans that rather a candidate that screamed about the possibly controversial social changes like illegal immigration, rather than “conservatively” being conservative. In the end, Trump’s opposing candidates ended up dropping out of the race, including Ted Cruz, and finally finished his campaign with nearly 50% of the delegate vote, while he lead his campaign at a steadily increasing 20% of the votes. Trump was yet to finish his race for the presidency, but throughout his primary election process, it was clear that his reform of a party he essentially grabbed control of, had a great effect on the next leg of the race.

By the end of the Presidential run, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the electoral college 306-232, a sweeping victory from what was expected. Winning the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, Trump managed to play the election the way it was supposed to be played; not by pleasing the most, but just enough to win him the key states he needed. Although the reasons for why Trump won the Presidential race against Hillary are innumerable, the totality of arguments can be summed up in a single statement; Trump did not win the election because he was the best candidate for the Presidency, but rather because Hillary was a candidate bound to lose.

Even before her entry into the race against Trump, Hillary was not the candidate that America wanted, and neither was her party. With Obama leaving the stage of America with two terms of unending controversy and problems ranging from government shutdown, to racial shootings, the Democratic party had a lot to pick up on very quickly to face their divided nation. With outgoing vice-president Joe Biden, and a handful of senators left defending the democratic flag after the 2014 midterms, two candidates including the populist left motivator, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton rose above the rest as the hopeful rejuvenating faces of the Democratic Party. As we know of now though, from leaks by former chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Donna Brazile and many within the Democratic Party, the DNC had chosen it’s candidate long before any other candidates could take a stand. Although the primary election was not technically rigged, the influence of an “invisible primary” within the elites of the DNC chose Hillary Clinton because “As Barack Obama’s presidency drew to a close, the DNC was deep in debt. In return for a bailout, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz gave Hillary Clinton’s campaign more potential control over its operations and hiring decisions than was either ethical or wise” (Klein, 2017) essentially giving her reigns to drive her nomination forwards, and was also chosen because of her longtime involvement in the Democratic Party as an iconic figure within the First Lady, Senator, and Secretary positions, favoring her endorsements, media coverage, and capital raising advantages. The result of this favoring within the elites of the party was that even before the primaries, Hillary was bound to win, and that was apparent. Candidates like ex-vice president Joe Biden passed upon the opportunity to run for the primary, and in the end, only 5 candidates were part of the first Democratic debate of 2015, including Bernie Sanders. What is interesting from this apparent existing bias is that although it eliminated the existence of multiple candidates like the 17 present in the Republican battle, it was of advantage to Bernie Sanders. Sanders, representing the populist-liberal left wing, with a message “that the powerful and connected were rigging the systems of wealth and influence against the powerless” (Klein, 2017) found himself with the perfect base for his message of corruption, his own party. With very few debates to showcase the Democratic candidates, and the invisible hand of the DNC, Hillary eventually won the primary election with 2807 delegates to Sanders’ 1893.

With the Democratic primary election almost decided ahead of time, it comes at a surprise that their choice of candidate was so weak. As a candidate that stood for more of the same, on the repetitive focus of the minorities of America rather than the majority common folk, the focus on education reform versus a conservative targeting the education less (Zurcher, 2016), and the lack of emphasis on giving concrete economic reforms for the better, Clinton was the wrong move against Trump (Roberts, 2016). Against a populist leader, Sanders, managed to rally all those that had lost faith in the political system and the Democratic Party, and rallied crowds of all ages, including the usually non-participating youth of America. In the end, Sanders was beat to the position of leader before he knew it, and the Democratic Party had chosen to keep politics about the party, and not about the leader. In many ways, Sanders was exactly like trump; A populist ideologist, a firm believer in the failure of the structure of America, and the voice of a leader when America needed it most as he stood for something different. The failure of the Democratic Party to realize who they were up against, and to post up an opposing, but similar leader, led to the supporters of the Democrats to divide instantly. This resentment in the DNC’s lack of fairness in the primaries led Hillary to lose the vote of the young and to essentially fail to recuperate the support of half of her own party. Upon this blunder, and a list of many more, Donald Trump swooped in for the kill.

The problems as Clinton as a candidate versus Trump did not end there though. As a candidate with seemingly no base for her promises and goals for her Presidency, Clinton “always appeared as a cold woman…, as a member of a political establishment rejected by many people” (Savoy, 2017) and a leader of a controversial time in politics. With a record of controversies with her Clinton Foundation, her time as Secretary of State under Obama being stained with issues like the apparent non-action and retention of knowledge that US allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar funded Isis (Cockburn, 2016), and the baggage of her ex-President husband Bill Clinton, and his fair share of controversy during his time in office. The stain on her name was immediately to the advantage of Trump, who in numerous occasions took the liberty of showing his followers the corrupt infection of his opposition. Essentially, Trump had the advantage over Clinton of having a name in the public lexicon associated with wealth and celebrity nature, while Clinton was left with a name in controversial politics, in a “system” that has never been too popular with the majority of Americans. The final controversy that rocked Clinton’s chances at the Presidency had to do with the learning of New York Times Reporter Michael Schmidt that during the Benghazi investigation of 2012, where the US consulate of Benghazi was overrun while Secretary of State Clinton was apparently aware of the incoming terrorist attacks (Graham, 2016), “Clinton had used a personal email account” using a private server, “and her staff decided with emails to turn over to the State Department as public records” and destroyed the “personal ones” (Graham, 2016). Through the divulging of this information to the media and to America, Director of the FBI James Comey stayed back for a while in July of 2016, but eventually testified that the FBI was investigating Clinton’s email scandal, 2 weeks before the general election (CNN, 2017). Although the conclusion of the investigation had no consequences on Clinton legally, the mere fact of the discovery of this news, added to onto her Clinton name, meant that she was to be portrayed as part of the mistrusted politicians of America, and Trump jumped on it. The rise of Trump seemed to coincide between Comey’s two letters where during electoral speeches, to his massive rallies, Trump ridiculed and used Hillary as the type of politician he hoped to replace.

Trump seemed to feed off of Clinton’s mistakes. Without a seemingly interesting or original plan for America brought to the table, Clinton spent her campaign trying to counter Trump, without making a plan of her own. From controversially calling Trump’s supporters “deplorables” and by selling her candidacy merely by being “uniquely qualified to become president” (Roberts, 2016). “Some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America” (Jacobs, 2016) Clinton said in a speech, not realizing that even if she doesn’t see them as America, the voting system still counts them if they show up. Clinton’s “stronger together” campaign and overall message seemed to only try to counter Trump’s success in divisiveness, and “ensured the battle was fought on Trump’s terms” (Roberts, 2016). What’s more, Clinton couldn’t compare to the campaigning battle fought by Trump even if she tried. Starting as a candidate almost 2 months before Clinton, Trump tackled 302 different rallies, compared to Clinton’s 276, but which doesn’t include his rallies before his official race began, and the rallies he continues to do as President (Smith, 2016). With under half of overall money raised (258-502 million), and with a large chunk coming from his own pocket, Trump managed to campaign in 45 states to Clinton’s 37. Although in the end, Clinton won the popular vote by a large margin, tactical mistakes in her campaign, such as the focus on states like Ohio and North Carolina which she lost by 51.8-43.7% and 50.5%-46.8% (CNN, 2016) instead of “spending time shoring up the famed blue wall, those 18 states that have voted Democrat for the past six elections” (Bryant, 2016). Trump’s final claim of Florida during the live election seemed to seal Clinton’s fate, as he had played the game of the electoral college well, and had rallied intensely throughout states he shouldn’t and was told he couldn’t win like Wisconsin and Michigan, but had rallied with a message. As not a “natural campaigner” with “flat and somewhat robotic” (Bryant, 2016) tones, Clinton lacked the ability as a candidate to spark the anger and the energy of her voters. Amid her scandals and the lack of trust from America as a whole, Clinton was fooled by a polling system that saw her at the driving seat, while she lost her a majority of her vote to the divided nature of her party with Bernie Sanders, and the vote recuperated by independents Johnson and Stein. During all of this, Trump kept chugging ahead, while Clinton tried to get some sort of message out.

Amid the Democratic Party’s failure in choosing a worthy opponent against him, Trump played a nearly genius political campaign that has secured his seat as the most controversial leader of our time. His strategy can be broken down into three small subsections; how he timed his rise, how he targeted the right people, and how he used the structure of America to his advantage, like social media. He first started with the timing of his rise, staying a lingering and hidden part of the political sphere of America for a long time. By endorsing Mitt Romney, and by starting the idea of the “Birther Movement”, Trump essentially started campaigning and getting his name out there in politics, long before his announcement of running for President. When he did announce his running in the race, he seemed to have picked no better time. America was in a state of division that had not yet been seen before. From the controversies and issues riddling the Obama presidency, primarily during the overturn and shutdown of the House of Congress in the 2014 midterms, Trump had chosen a time to run in which a majority of Americans were fed up with the same type of politician, with the same type of results after their time in office. Trump “was also able to tap into many Republicans’ anger, some of it tinged with racism, about President Obama and his policies..., and into a general disgust with professional politicians, some of which was brought about by the G.O.P.’s own obstructionism” (Cassidy, 2016) and essentially, as an outside candidate revolutionizing the divided and stale Republican Party, was able to spark his “make America great again” message and target the Americans that were left behind for so long.

In addition to choosing the perfect time to run, Trump also chose the right people to target with his ideas. By “ignoring every norm of American politics and hoping to reflect the silent majority” (Savoy, 2017), Trump placed himself as the propagator of sincerity and authority by ignoring the conventional political “politeness” and saying what he had on mind. Through “verbosity, egocentricity, and pomposity” (Savoy, 2017) Trump became the ideal populist movement motivator, and in turn, became what America had been lacking the most in their divisive nature: A leader. Appealing to the left behind of America, the deplorable white men (most that were uneducated) that made up the of the population, that had been left behind in past Republican ideologies. Trump used his flaunting of wealth, his boast of economic prosperity and oppositely “about his debt because it reduced or eliminated his income-tax liability” (Calmes, n.d.) which he inturn spun around to favor his “intelligence”, he targeted the fear in Americans when it came to immigration, the dangers of globalization, and the terrorism threat as he “sensed that his illiberal proposals would prove popular with ordinary G.O.P” (Cassidy, 2016), and finally targeted what middle America cared the most about “religion, liberty, marriage, sexuality, abortion and gun rights” (Krieg, 2016) and he wasn’t scared to voice his un-pc opinion about them. He targeted the America that was said to have “white privilege”, and in turn spun his policies, and those of the Republican Party, in promising to give them the privilege they were accused of having through putting America first in world politics and ideology by limiting free trade, and through the protection of conservative rights of the masses. Upon further analysis of the statistics, of which are well presented in Benjy Sarlin’s analysis of the Trump voting base, it is clear that he succeeded in his mission of targetting the invisible America as higher distressed white Americans drove in waves to vote for Trump. What’s more, the opposing wave of critics To Trump and his supporters only pushed the hypocrisy further as the “white wave” had seen and expected so many qualified candidates before Trump, but had seen nothing out of it. Essentially, as an outsider, “Trump positioned himself closer than other candidates to where the average voter was on these issues” (Mutz, 2018) and in return, only managed to connect with more voters that never quite saw their Republican vote being used properly by prior candidates.

Last, but not least, Trump managed to time and target the right people through the right propagation of his message. From the very first speech, his controversial opinions on non-pc topics like illegal Mexican immigration were propagated across the news. Through insulting decorated war veteran John McCain, and offering a “half-hearted apology when the secret video surfaced of his boasting about making unwanted sexual advances towards women” (Krieg 2016), Trump quickly became the laughing stock of the American media. As the fool of the Republican Party, Trump used the media attention to his full benefit, and through his numerous controversies, actually gained support in his message of going against the “normal” and usual politician. As the destroyer of political correctness, a wave of “ideology of shame” was propagated by the Democratic Party and the American media, only further fueling the followers that understood Trump as the self-funded and politically untouchable candidate that was not influenced by any external factors, because he managed to say exactly what he wanted. The more he was controversial, including his ongoing problems with the Mueller investigation and the possible meddling of Russia, the more his name got out there, and the more people showed up to his rallies in waves. Through controlling the preexisting structure of the “hawking” media, that strikes on any story, and through his revolution in the use of social media, Trump was capable of spreading his message, as no other candidate had done before. By being controversial constantly in person, to taking a break to be leud on Twitter, Trump never stopped his train of influence.

In conclusion, in 2016, America had to chose between two Presidential candidates that were unloved by most Americans. On one hand, America could choose a long time, experienced political actor, but with a baggage of controversies and a lack of message behind her name and campaign. On the other, a braggadocious, often leud and rude celebrity billionaire, with a never before seen rise in political stance through the rallying of the “deplorable” and left-behind middle America, with a strong message of empowering those that never had their voice. These were America’s options, and in the end, America chose change through the election of a long-lost leader figure to the most important position of power in the world. How Trump really did it could be analyzed for years and years to come, with no real definitive answers. But regardless, he may just have been a genius for it.

Refrences

-BBC News. (2017, January 20). Donald Trump’s life story: From hotel developer to president. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-35318432

-CNN Library. (2018, September 18). Donald Trump Fast Facts. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2013/07/04/us/donald-trump-fast-facts/index.html

-Cassidy, J. (2016, March 3). The problem with the “never-trump” movement. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-problem-with-the-never-trump-movement

-Cassidy, J. (2016, May 4). How Trump won the G.O.P. nomination. The New Yorker. Retrieved from

https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/how-donald-trump-won-the-g-o-p-nomination

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https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results/president

-Zurcher, A. (2016, November 10). US Election 2016 Results. A Democratic Part in disarray. BBC News. Retrieved from

https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37930473

-CNN Politics. (n.d.) Democratic Primary Results. Retrieved from

https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/primaries/parties/democrat

-Klein, E. (2017, November 14). Was the Democratic primary rigged? Vox. Retrieved from

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/14/16640082/donna-brazile-warren-bernie-sanders-democratic-primary-rigged

-Cockburn, P. (2016, October 14). We finally know what Hillary Clinton knew all along – US allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar are funding Isis. Independent. Retrieved from

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/hillary-clinton-wikileaks-email-isis-saudi-arabia-qatar-us-allies-funding-barack-obama-knew-all-a7362071.html

-CNN Library. (2018, April 17). James Comey Fast Facts. Retrieved from

https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/03/us/james-comey-fast-facts/index.html

-Graham, D. A. (2016, Novemeber 6). From Whitewater to Benghazi: A Clinton-Scandal Primer. The Atlantic. Retrieved from

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/tracking-the-clinton-controversies-from-whitewater-to-benghazi/396182/

-Jacobs, B. (2016, Septemeber 10). Hillary Clinton calls half of Trump supporters bigoted 'deplorables'. The Guardian. Retrieved from

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/10/hillary-clinton-trump-supporters--bigoted-deplorables

-Smith, C., Kreutz, L. (2016, November 7). Hillary Clinton's and Donald Trump's Campaigns by the Numbers. Abc News. Retrieved from

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hillary-clinton-donald-trumps-campaigns-numbers/story?id=43356783

-Bryant, N. (2016, November, 9). Hillary Clinton and the US election: What went wrong for her? BBC News. Retrieved from

https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37922959

-Roberts, D. (2016, November 9). Why Hillary Clinton lost the election: the economy, trust and a weak message. The Guardian. Retrieved from

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/09/hillary-clinton-election-president-loss

-Calmes, J. (n.d.). Donald Trump: Life before the Presidency. UVA, Miller Center. Retrieved from

https://millercenter.org/president/trump/life-presidency

-Savoy, J. (2017, August 16). Trump’s and Clinton’s Style and Rhetoric during the 2016 Presidential Election. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 25(2), 168-169. doi: 10.1080/09296174.2017.1349358

-Sarlin, B. (2016, June 20). United States of Trump. NBC News. Retrieved from

https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/donald-trump-republican-party

-Mutz, D. C. (2018, August 5). Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(19), 4330-4339. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1718155115

-Krieg, G. (2016, November 10). How did Trump win? Here are 24 theories. CNN Politics. Retrieved from

https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/10/politics/why-donald-trump-won/index.html

-Zurcher, A. (2016, November 9). US Election 2016 Results: Five reasons Donald Trump won. BBC News. Retrieved from

https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37918303

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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WHY IS JOHN KELLY SPEAKING OUT NOW?.... The former chief of staff is making the case that he spoke truth to power inside the White House. The trouble for him is how many Americans won’t be convinced.

BY PETER NICHOLAS | Published February 13, 2020 4:23 PM ET | The Atlantic | Posted February 13, 2020 |

MORRISTOWN, N.J.—John Kelly had just finished his speech and opened up the floor to questions when a woman in the audience walked up to a microphone. She asked him how he plans “to atone for the blood of those immigrant children that are dying in detention centers” and while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

The accusation summed up the substantial skepticism and hostility that Kelly, the former White House chief of staff, faced here last night. Throughout his 75-minute appearance at the Mayo Performing Arts Center, hecklers in the crowd stood and shouted at him about the Trump administration’s family-separation practice and Muslim travel ban, two of the most controversial policies the White House enacted during Kelly’s tenure. Kelly also got smacked by the right. This morning, after I reported on his comments questioning Donald Trump’s North Korea policy and defending the actions of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, his former boss scolded him on Twitter for speaking out. Kelly “just can’t keep his mouth shut,” the president tweeted.

Not many people who’ve worked closely with Trump have left the administration and unburdened themselves about what they saw. Yet seldom has it been more important to hear the unsparing evaluations of people who watched Trump in action. When a president routinely presents a warped picture of his own actions, it’s essential for the people who were in the room to verify what took place.

Kelly’s experience shows why many officials decide to keep quiet. Trump’s critics aren’t eager to absolve officials who were part of an administration whose policies they abhor. And Team Trump, meanwhile, won’t tolerate a whiff of dissent.

So most of the Trump diaspora has simply decided to stay silent. We’ve heard little from former Defense Secretary James Mattis since he resigned in 2018 over Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria, though he did speak to the Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, about his tenure last year. In that interview, he said he owed the Trump administration a period of silence, though he added that it wouldn’t last forever.

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who once reportedly called Trump a “moron,” hasn’t said all that much about the president’s go-it-alone approach to foreign policy. Gary Cohn, the White House’s former top economic adviser, clashed with Trump over tariff policy and the president’s remarks about the 2017 white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Since his departure the following year, though, Cohn has been circumspect. Indeed, what we know about the White House’s inner workings has largely come from the press. (Last night, Kelly, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, praised Barbara Starr, the longtime defense reporter for the very same cable network Trump loves to hate: CNN.)

Unlike others—including some of his fellow retired generals who once staffed the administration—Kelly has decided that he will speak out, albeit on his own terms. Since his departure from the White House in January 2019, he’s given public speeches and occasional press interviews. As time passes and he gets more distance, his comments have become more revealing. Last month, during a tense period in the Senate impeachment trial, Kelly told a reporter that lawmakers needed to hear from witnesses—a position at odds with that of Trump’s legal team, which had pressed for a quick, no-fuss acquittal.

It may be that Kelly wants to be the author of his own story and inch away from the most polarizing presidency in decades. He made a point last night of mentioning that his wife urged him to join the Trump administration as a form of civic duty. Before he was chief of staff, Kelly ran the Department of Homeland Security. When he got a question about the travel ban, which was enacted in the first days of the Trump administration, Kelly said that DHS officials “were not consulted.”

“It just happened,” he continued. “And it fell on my shoulders, and the people I led at DHS, because there was this immediate confusion: How do you implement this ban?” He added: “Ethically, I did not agree with what this ban was written to do.” Six months later, he joined the White House as Trump’s chief of staff.

At one point in his speech, Kelly talked about Vindman and how young soldiers are trained. “We teach them to always tell the truth, to tell truth to power,” he said.

Kelly is making the case that he himself spoke truth to power inside the Trump administration. The trouble is, many Americans won’t be convinced. They’d likely ask why someone who held so much power couldn’t quash the policies he is criticizing.

When he told the audience about “illegal adults coming across the border,” the woman who suggested that he had blood on his hands broke in.

“No human being is illegal,” she said.

“Stay with me—they are under the law,” Kelly replied.

The woman clearly wasn’t with him.

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It's good that John Kelly is speaking up. But it would have been even better to hear his defense of Lt. Col. Vindman and his judgment on the president's "illegal order" earlier, when these issues were key to a national debate and to an important decision by our elected officials.

"John Kelly said Lt. Col. Vindman is blameless and simply followed the training he’d received as a soldier; migrants are "overwhelmingly good people" and "not all rapists"; and Trump's decision to condition aid to Ukraine upended long-standing U.S. policy."

JOHN KELLY FINALLY LET'S LOOSE ON TRUMP..... The former chief of staff explained, in the clearest terms yet, his misgivings about Trump’s behavior regarding North Korea, immigration, and Ukraine.

By PETER NICHOLAS | Published February 13, 2020 1:05 AM ET | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted Feb 13, 2020

MORRISTOWN, N.J.—Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the former National Security Council aide and impeachment witness President Donald Trump fired Friday, was just doing his job, former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly told students and guests at a Drew University event here Wednesday night.

Over a 75-minute speech and Q&A session, Kelly laid out, in the clearest terms yet, his misgivings about Trump’s words and actions regarding North Korea, illegal immigration, military discipline, Ukraine, and the news media.

Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, said that Vindman is blameless and was simply following the training he’d received as a soldier; migrants are “overwhelmingly good people” and “not all rapists”; and Trump’s decision to condition military aid to Ukraine on an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden upended long-standing U.S. policy.

Vindman was rightly disturbed by Trump’s phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July, Kelly suggested: Having seen something “questionable,” Vindman properly notified his superiors, Kelly said. Vindman, who specialized in Ukraine policy at the National Security Council at the time, was among multiple U.S. officials who listened in on the call. When subpoenaed by Congress in the House impeachment hearings, Vindman complied and told the truth, Kelly said.

“He did exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave,” Kelly told the audience at the Mayo Performing Arts Center. “He went and told his boss what he just heard.”

Although Trump has long insisted that his call to Zelensky was “perfect,” Kelly made clear that Trump indeed conditioned military aid on Zelensky’s help digging up dirt on the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

That amounted to a momentous change in U.S. policy toward Ukraine—one that Vindman was right to flag, because other federal agencies needed to know about the shift, Kelly said.

“Through the Obama administration up until that phone call, the policy of the U.S. was militarily to support Ukraine in their defensive fight against … the Russians,” Kelly said. “And so, when the president said that continued support would be based on X, that essentially changed. And that’s what that guy [Vindman] was most interested in.”

When Vindman heard the president tell Zelensky he wanted to see the Biden family investigated, that was tantamount to hearing “an illegal order,” Kelly said. “We teach them, ‘Don’t follow an illegal order. And if you’re ever given one, you’ll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this is an illegal order, and then tell your boss.’”

Throughout the appearance, Kelly laid out his doubts about Trump’s policies. Trump has held two formal summits with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, hoping to scuttle the country’s nuclear program through personal diplomacy. Kelly said the effort was futile.

“He will never give his nuclear weapons up,” Kelly said. “Again, President Trump tried—that’s one way to put it. But it didn’t work. I’m an optimist most of the time, but I’m also a realist, and I never did think Kim would do anything other than play us for a while, and he did that fairly effectively.”

Kelly didn’t know Trump when, after the 2016 election, he was first offered the job of secretary of homeland security. Watching the contest between Trump and the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, Kelly said he had been “fascinated—not necessarily in a good way—but fascinated as to what that election meant to our country.”

He said his wife urged him to accept the position, telling him, “I frankly think he needs you and people like you.” Kelly ran the Department of Homeland Security until the summer of 2017, when Trump tapped him to replace outgoing Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. Kelly left the White House early last year.

At times Wednesday, Kelly sounded like the anti-Trump. He said he did not believe the press is “the enemy of the people,” for example. And he sharply criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Trump has steadfastly courted. Kelly described Putin as someone who is “not necessarily a rational actor.” Putin sits atop “a society in collapse,” yet is intent on restoring “the glory days of the Soviet Union,” he said.

At DHS, Kelly was responsible for advancing two of Trump’s top priorities: stopping the flow of illegal immigration, and building a border wall to make unauthorized crossings more difficult. In the speech, he said he disagreed with Trump about the scope of the problem. Trump’s border wall doesn’t need to extend “from sea to shining sea,” Kelly said. He also disapproved of the president’s language about migrants, he said. When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, he famously described some migrants coming into the U.S. from Mexico as “rapists” and criminals.

Kelly said most migrants are merely looking for jobs. “In fact, they’re overwhelmingly good people … They’re not all rapists and they’re not all murderers. And it’s wrong to characterize them that way. I disagreed with the president a number of times.”

Responding to questions from the audience, Kelly faulted Trump for intervening in the case of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who was convicted last year of posing with the corpse of an Islamic State fighter. Trump reversed a Navy decision to oust Gallagher, in a chain of events that led to the resignation of Navy Secretary Richard Spencer.

“The idea that the commander in chief intervened there, in my opinion, was exactly the wrong thing to do,” Kelly said. “Had I been there, I think I could have prevented it.”

The audience applauded.

When a woman in the crowd said that Trump had “elevated” Gallagher, Kelly looked out at the crowd.

“Yep,” he said.

*********

Madison’s Nightmare Has Come to America

The impeachment and subsequent acquittal of President Trump have revealed deep flaws in the constitutional system.

By Michael Gerhard, Constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina | Published February 13, 2020 at 9:10 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted February 13, 2020 |

The Senate’s impeachment trial of President Donald Trump is over, ending with all but one Republican voting to acquit. But the effort to make sense of its constitutional ramifications is only beginning.

Almost a half century ago, President Richard Nixon’s resignation was thought to have proved that the constitutional system worked, with the House, the Senate, and a special prosecutor each having conducted long, painstaking investigations into his misconduct; the Supreme Court having directed President Nixon to comply with a judicial subpoena to turn over taped conversations; and the House Judiciary Committee having approved three articles of impeachment shortly before Nixon resigned.

Margaret Taylor: The Founders set an extremely high bar for impeachment

In sharp contrast, few think that the acquittal of President Trump is a triumph for the Constitution. Instead, it reveals a different, disturbing lesson, about how the American political system—and the Constitution itself—might be fundamentally flawed.

Since the writing of the Constitution, three developments have substantially altered the effectiveness of impeachment as a check on presidential misconduct. The first is the rise of extreme partisanship, under which each party’s goal is frequently to vanquish the other and control as much of the federal government as possible. This aim is fundamentally incompatible with the system that James Madison designed, premised as it was on negotiation, compromise, and a variety of checking mechanisms to ensure that no branch or faction was beyond the reach of the Constitution or the law.

In 2018, this extreme partisanship and its detrimental effects were on full display at the Senate confirmation hearing for the then–Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Senators, by nearly the same vote as they acquitted Trump, expedited Kavanaugh’s confirmation and thwarted an investigation into his possible misconduct that would have delayed or derailed it. Similarly, in 2016, a slim majority of Republican senators held no hearings on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, preserving the vacancy for President Trump to fill. In both of these events, Republican partisans sought only to prevail, and would not allow for an independent Senate review and investigation of the sort that Madison would have hoped for. Furthermore, the rabid partisanship of the Senate, which Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, denounced in her statement explaining her vote to acquit Trump, is all the more disturbing because the thin majority of the Senate that stalled Garland, confirmed Kavanaugh, and voted to hear no witnesses and not to seek further document production in the Trump trial represents less than half of the American electorate.

The second is the rise of the internet and social media, which has upended the information ecosystem that democracy needs to survive. Madison was one of many Framers who believed that the intricate system of checks and balances in the Constitution depended on the public’s growing interest in being informed about government. He wrote, “I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom.” The proliferation of media outlets online enables people to consult news sources that hew to their opinions, but has not forced them to confront different opinions or search for any objective truth. This tendency, in turn, reinforces the extreme partisanship that pushes people back into their niche—and to so-called facts that are shaped by news sources rather than the events themselves.

The third development is the major change to the process for selecting senators. When the Framers created the Senate, they sought to insulate it from the vicissitudes of public opinion. To do so, they proposed that senators be selected by state legislators. This approach, however, rarely produced a Senate disposed to take the long view and to rise above petty partisanship. In 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment did away with the original scheme for selecting senators, and people have been voting directly for them ever since.

Shortly before he died, Justice Antonin Scalia lamented that change, saying the amendment had killed federalism, the constitutional ideal of the states and federal government keeping each other in check. Even if the late justice’s concern was hyperbolic, it is true that the Senate has since become more like the House, its members primarily attuned to the need for reelection and to follow the whims or attitudes of popular majorities. The fallout from these changes has been the erosion of the Senate’s independence from presidential and party or factional control.

Yet, partisanship, the rise of the internet and social media, and changes in Senate selection do not fully explain what happened in the Trump trial.

The president, since being acquitted, has shown how wrong Republican Senator Susan Collins was when she said he had “learned” from his impeachment. In fact, the president said she was wrong and denounced the “evil,” “corrupt,” “vicious,” “scum,” “sleazebag,” and “crooked” Democratic leaders, and the impeachment effort itself as a scam. In spite of the condemnation of 53 senators (including the first senator to vote to convict and remove from office a president of his own party), Trump insisted that his phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “perfect.” He also began retaliating against those who’d raised concerns about him freezing aid to Ukraine and pressuring Zelensky to announce an investigation into Joe Biden, including dismissing Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman and Vindman’s twin brother (who had no connection to the Ukraine scandal) and Ambassador Gordon Sondland. The president has unleashed his usual vitriol against senators who dared to vote to convict him for his misconduct in office. Republican senators, who largely voted to acquit the president, have stood mutely by while the president wreaks his revenge, including demanding that top Justice Department officials recommend a lesser sentence for his crony Roger Stone (which led four prosecutors to withdraw from the case in protest).

Such outrage, along with the prospect of a president emboldened to do as he pleases, demonstrates how ineffective the mechanism of impeachment is now. As Abbe Lowell, a former counsel for the House Democrats, put it just after the Senate acquitted President Bill Clinton, the most effective check on presidential misconduct was the pressure to resign, not impeachment. But that alternative to impeachment does not work with presidents who are unwilling to confess error and see no reason to leave office.

Without resignation as an option, and the resistance of the president’s party to his ouster, the prospect that the Constitution’s two-thirds threshold for conviction and removal will ever be met is nil. Each of the three presidential-impeachment trials in American history ended with acquittals, the first with an immensely unpopular president who may have bribed senators to acquit him, the second with a popular president whose party had the numbers to block his conviction, and the third for a president whose party dared not offend or oppose him. Impeachment, in brief, has yet to work against a president of the United States. Any president prone to misconduct can look at the pattern and see that as long as he can keep most, if not all, of his party’s senators in line, he is immune to conviction and removal from office. Future presidents will see the acquittals as license to do whatever they want.

Jane Chong: This is not the Senate the Framers imagined

The lesson in all this isn’t that the Constitution has recently broken so much as that its flaws, always present, have been fully revealed. The bar for removing a president is too high for American politics ever to clear, and party resistance to abandoning their own is too strong; the result is a virtually unrestrained executive. Without impeachment available as a meaningful check on presidential abuse of power, the only option left for holding a president accountable is the electoral process, the very one that 53 senators criticized President Trump for trying to rig. Americans have every reason to expect the president to cut deals with foreign interests to help his reelection and businesses and hurt his political foes.

Amid all this, public conversation has reached a nadir. Madison believed that civil discourse was everyone’s responsibility, that representative government could not work unless the people themselves took education and enlightenment seriously. Twenty years ago, when I testified as a joint witness at the House’s impeachment against President Clinton, I received a handful of notes and emails, most positive.

This time was different: Emulating the president in tone, hundreds of people sent me emails and letters calling me names, spewing profanity, condemning my education and me for being Jewish; many insinuated or made threats against me and my family. The hate mail proclaimed that I knew nothing about impeachment and should be fired.

The coarsening of public debate is one of this president’s many destructive legacies. He has spouted vitriol and hatred at millions of Americans whose offenses are telling the truth and daring to question him.

Yet, more is at stake in the next election than Trump remaining president or the truth. Voters must choose between two competing visions of the Constitution. A Trump loss this November will be an important step in restoring the Madisonian Constitution, with its aspirations for a virtuous and enlightened electorate, along with its safeguards against an executive who can do whatever he wants. A Trump victory would essentially replace Madison’s Constitution with Trump’s own vision, which equates his office with his own personal interests, and proclaims that he can do no wrong, that he may not be held accountable anyplace except where he chooses, and that he alone tells the truth. This would fulfill Madison’s nightmare, establishing the very thing the Framers shook off: tyranny.

______

This story is part of the project “The Battle for the Constitution,” in partnership with the National Constitution Center.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected].

______

MICHAEL GERHARDT is Scholar-in-Residence at the National Constitution Center and Burton Craige Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of North Carolina School of Law. He is the author of Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know.

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Why Bill Weld Is Really Running Against Trump

The former Massachusetts governor thinks he can rebuke the president even without beating him.

By ADAM Harris | Published February 12, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted February 13, 2020 |

President Donald Trump strolled to a dominating victory in New Hampshire last night. “Wouldn’t a big story be that I got more New Hampshire Primary Votes than any incumbent president, in either party, in the history of that Great State,” he tweeted. “Not an insignificant fact!”

On a night when Bernie Sanders became the clear Democratic front-runner and Amy Klobuchar found a new wave of momentum, Trump wanted his preeminence in the Republican Party to be known. Commanding more than 85 percent of the vote, Trump spun it as an unqualified victory. While it wasn’t the resounding 97 percent of the vote that Ronald Reagan carried as the incumbent in 1984, Trump won a higher percentage of the vote than Barack Obama, both George Bushes, and Bill Clinton did in their reelection primaries.

But from his watch party in Manchester last night, facing the Merrimack River, former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld, who received 9 percent of the vote in the state’s Republican primary, was still holding on to hope. “Longtime Trump advisor Steve Bannon said that if Donald Trump loses 3% of the traditional Republican vote, he won’t be re-elected,” he said in a written statement. “I guess he won’t be re-elected.”

On Thursday, tucked inside a basement college classroom in Durham, New Hampshire, that could have doubled as a bunker, Weld described the stakes of his campaign. His expectations were the floor, he told me, leaning back and opening a bag of popcorn. If he got even a semblance of support, it meant that Republicans—and independents, who are able to vote in the state’s primary—were receptive to someone other than Trump. If Trump’s command of the Republican Party is complete, Weld at least hopes to be the firewall preventing Trumpism from spreading beyond the GOP.

Read: Breakfast with Bill Weld

“I’ve always been on the libertarian edge of the Republican Party,” he said. “But I certainly don’t feel a member of this party as it’s represented in Washington, D.C., right now.” There should be no illusions as to whether Weld will win the nomination. (He almost certainly won’t.) The president boasts a 94 percent approval rating among Republicans, according to the latest Gallup poll. But being an underdog has its benefits. “There’s nothing for me to be fearful about,” Weld said.

Among independents, Trump has a 42 percent approval rating. Weld believes that he can persuade those independents to stick with him in several of the open primaries—and semi-open primaries, such as New Hampshire’s—with what he calls the “whole truth” about Trump: that the president is an “outrageous racist” who is unqualified for office. While Pat Buchanan–esque finishes are out of reach—the political pundit won 37 percent of the New Hampshire–primary vote in 1992 against the incumbent, George H. W. Bush—an insurgent influence campaign may not be.

Never Trumpism might be more of a capillary than a vein, Weld believes, but it’s a vital one. “People ask me, you know, ‘Why are you in this?’” he said.“I mean, my goodness, we’re looking at a president who thinks that he doesn’t have to listen to anybody and he’s unwilling to read anything.” He added, “That’s dangerous for the United States.”

Thirty minutes before Weld and I spoke, he was upstairs sitting in an audience, searching for a microphone to offer more of a comment than a question to Deval Patrick, also a former governor of Massachusetts, who was speaking at a forum on higher education. Weld had called Patrick the day after Patrick announced his run for the presidency to let him know that he admired what he was doing. Then, together, they lauded another former Massachusetts governor for his vote to impeach the president. “We can welcome Governor [Mitt] Romney to the good guys’ club this time,” Weld joked. (Patrick dropped out of the race this morning after failing to gain traction in Iowa and New Hampshire.)

I asked Weld what it would mean if he’s actually able to sway some Republican voters. “It means that there is an appetite for an alternative to Trump,” he said. Then, I asked, what if he’s not successful? Well, he said, it means that Republicans are not willing “to listen to someone who’s pointing out that Emperor Trump doesn’t have a nice new fancy set of clothes on.”

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Trump’s Biggest Vulnerability

His lies about health care at the State of the Union signal just how weak he is on the issue.

By RONALD BROWNSTEIN | Published February 6, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted February 13, 2020 |

President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday offered a preview of the economic debate that could tip the presidential election this fall.

The speech crystallized a key question: Will voters measure their personal economic well-being primarily through trends in unemployment and the stock market, or by whether their income is keeping up with their costs, particularly for health care? It’s a crucial distinction, because polls show that while a clear majority of Americans give Trump positive marks for his handling of the economy, a large majority also consistently disapprove of his record on health care.

“While economic indicators are generally moving in the right direction, health-care indicators are not,” says Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan group.

On Tuesday night, Trump triumphantly rattled off figures about buoyant job growth, record-low unemployment among African Americans and Latinos, and soaring highs for the stock market. Though some of the figures were exaggerated, and others represented more of a continuation than a break from the economy’s performance under President Barack Obama, fact-checkers generally found relatively little to debunk.

Read: Trump has no room for error in 2020

But Trump’s treatment of health care was very different. Though he was just as assertive in his tone, the president made a series of false claims—in particular, he repeatedly lied about his administration’s unrelenting efforts to gut the Affordable Care Act. To Democrats, Trump’s determination to surround his health-care record with what Winston Churchill once called a “bodyguard of lies” clearly signaled that the president recognizes how vulnerable his record could prove this fall.

Polls leave little doubt that voters express much more positive assessments of the economy than the health-care system. “Because people see health care as so central to both their personal well-being and their financial well-being, health care stands out as Trump’s No. 1 vulnerability,” says the longtime Democratic pollster Geoff Garin. “The simplest way for people to understand the Trump economy is that whatever wage increases they are getting are smaller than the increases in their health-care premiums and out-of-pocket health-care costs.”

Over the past year, voters’ optimism about the economy has increased consistently across a wide array of polls. With this tailwind, the share of Americans who approve of Trump’s handling of the economy has also increased, settling in at about 55 percent. As I’ve written, Trump faces more resistance than any previous president among voters satisfied with the economy; about one-fifth of those who say they approve of Trump on the economy still say they disapprove of his overall performance.

But even so, that still means that most voters who approve of Trump’s economic performance approve of him overall. As Trump’s ratings for managing the economy have increased, so have his overall approval ratings. Just this week, Gallup showed his job approval spiking to 49 percent, its highest rating ever for him—although other polls have not recorded as dramatic an increase.

But the public assessment of Trump’s performance on health care tells a different story. In an Associated Press/National Opinion Research Center survey last month, just 38 percent of Americans said they approved of his record on health care—a grade that has stayed relatively stable since he took office—compared with 56 percent who approved of his handling of the economy, the highest of his presidency.

The latest monthly health-care poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation drilled down further into those views. In the survey, just about a third of adults gave Trump positive marks for dealing with preexisting conditions, the ACA, and prescription-drug costs. Detailed results provided to me by Kaiser showed that two key groups of swing voters shared this deep skepticism of Trump’s health-care record. A majority of college-educated white men disapproved of how Trump has handled each of the three issues. And while white women without a college degree—a group that could decide the Rust Belt states that tilted the 2016 election to Trump—broke against him more narrowly on the ACA and preexisting conditions, just 31 percent of them gave him positive marks on prescription-drug costs.

The Republican pollster Gene Ulm told me that easing those doubts about his handling of health-care issues is crucial for Trump’s reelection prospects. “No president would be in the game without people believing the economy is getting better than it was,” Ulm said. But for “the next cluster of voters” beyond those immediately drawn to him, “it’s the cost of health care, prescription drugs, and the whole cluster of premiums, co-pays, [and] out-of-pocket expenses” that matter most.

And on those fronts, the best measure of Trump’s anxiety was his mendacity in describing his record on Tuesday night.

Trump, not for the first time, flatly lied about his efforts to revoke the ACA’s protections for those with preexisting conditions. Not only is his administration currently in federal court seeking to invalidate the entire ACA, but in 2017 he endorsed Republican proposals in Congress to effectively erase those protections by allowing insurance companies to charge people who have greater health needs more. “It’s notable that the president feels the need to say he’s protecting people with preexisting conditions,” Levitt says, “but the facts just don’t back that up.”

On prescription drugs, the gap between Trump’s words and actions isn’t quite as stark. Kenneth Thorpe, a health economist at Emory University who served in President Bill Clinton’s administration, told me Trump was correct when he said that federal data showed a decline in overall prescription-drug costs last year. The problem is that prices for some high-profile drugs (such as insulin) are still rising, and the overall cost has stabilized at a level that is unaffordable for many Americans. An added concern, Thorpe said, is that more insurance plans are including prescription drugs in their total deductibles—meaning that patients must spend more out of pocket until they reach that threshold. “What people care about is what they pay, not what the overall cost of the medication is,” he told me.

Trump has talked about confronting prescription-drug costs since his 2016 campaign, when he embraced the long-standing Democratic idea of allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower prices with drug companies. But amid opposition from the pharmaceutical industry, and Republicans leery of an aggressive federal role in health care, he renounced that proposal.

Democrats, meanwhile, have picked up the mantle, putting it at the center of the H.R. 3 legislation that the House passed in December. (That was the bill House Democrats were alluding to when a group of them rose to chant “H.R. 3” during Trump’s State of the Union address.)

Read: The votes that could deliver Democrats another majority

The GOP-led Senate hasn’t taken up the bill, but the public’s intense focus on drug costs makes it possible that Trump will offer some proposals on the issue before Election Day. That’s why it’s so essential for Democrats to more sharply define the terms of debate right now. “It is really important for Democrats to set the bar on the drug-pricing issue at whether someone supports or opposes giving Medicare the power to negotiate,” Garin warns.

As of now, though, the party’s 2020 presidential candidates have provided almost no visibility to drug pricing, while incessantly arguing over a single-payer system that would eliminate private health insurance. That’s symptomatic of the Democratic candidates’ broader failure to explicitly make a case against Trump’s health-care record, even as they release extensive health-care plans of their own.

Health-care issues—in particular, promises to protect people with preexisting conditions and to tackle prescription-drug prices—were a central reason Democrats notched big gains in the 2018 midterm elections, even as a clear majority of voters viewed the economy positively. In 2020, health care again probably offers Democrats their best chance to inoculate themselves against Trump’s claim that the economy is working for most Americans. But so far at least, Democrats on the campaign trail are letting the president off the hook.

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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One of the most puzzling elements of the 2016 election, at least for a lot of Americans, was the millions of voters who switched from voting for Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016. Somewhere between 6.7 million and 9.2 million Americans switched this way; given that the 2016 election was decided by 40,000 votes, it’s fair to say that Obama-Trump switchers were one of the key reasons that Hillary Clinton lost.

The existence of those voters has served as evidence that the most plausible explanation for what happened in 2016 — that Trump’s campaign tapped into the racism of white Americans to win pivotal states — is wrong. “How could white Americans who voted for a black president in the past be racist,” or so the thinking goes.

“Clinton suffered her biggest losses in the places where Obama was strongest among white voters. It’s not a simple racism story,” the New York Times’s Nate Cohn wrote on the night of the election. This typically segues into an argument that Trump won by tapping into economic, rather than racial, anxiety — anger about trade and the decline of manufacturing, or the fallout from the 2008 Great Recession.

A new study shows that this response isn’t as powerful as it may seem. The study, from three political scientists from around the country, takes a statistical look at a large sample of Obama-Trump switchers. It finds that these voters tended to score highly on measures of racial hostility and xenophobia — and were not especially likely to be suffering economically.

“White voters with racially conservative or anti-immigrant attitudes switched votes to Trump at a higher rate than those with more liberal views on these issues,” the paper’s authors write. “We find little evidence that economic dislocation and marginality were significantly related to vote switching in 2016.”

This new paper fits with a sizeable slate of studies conducted over the past 18 months or so, most of which have come to the same conclusions: There is tremendous evidence that Trump voters were motivated by racial resentment (as well as hostile sexism), and very little evidence that economic stress had anything to do with it.

This isn’t just a matter of historical interest or ideological ax-grinding. Understanding the precise way in which racism affected the 2016 election should shape how we think about the electorate in the run-up to the 2018 midterms. More broadly, it helps us understand the subtleties of America’s primordial divide over race — and why racism will continue to fracture the country politically for the foreseeable future.

The three scholars who wrote the study — UCLA’s Tyler Reny, UC-Riverside’s Loren Collingwood, and Princeton’s Ali Valenzuela — drew on a database that has information on more than 64,000 American voters. Inside that huge sample, they restricted their analysis to white voters who switched their presidential vote from 2012 to 2016 (most commonly from one major party’s candidate to the other’s, but occasionally from a third party in 2012 to Clinton or Trump).

They then split the sample of white voters in two, between working-class and non-working class voters, and then tried to figure out what the vote switchers ran in common. To do so, they ran tests on three different types of question: scores on a test measuring attitudes towards racial minorities, hostility to mass immigration, and measures of economic stress (e.g., whether a person’s family income was lower or higher than the median income in the county where they lived).

The results were quite striking. First, attitudes on race and immigration were crucial distinguishing characteristics of both Trump and Clinton switchers. The more racially conservative an Obama or third party voter was, the more likely they were to switch to Trump. Similarly, the more racially liberal a Romney or third-party voter was, the more likely they were to switch to Clinton.

Second, class was largely irrelevant in switching to Trump. Keeping racial attitudes constant, white working-class voters were not more likely to switch to Trump. The white working-class voters who did switch tended to score about as highly on measures of racial conservatism and anti-immigrant attitudes as wealthier switchers.

Third, the correlations between measures of economic stress and vote switching were either weak or non-existent. There’s just little evidence supporting the “economic anxiety” or “economic populism” explanations for the Trump surge.

“We find a much stronger association between symbolic racial and immigration attitudes and switching for Trump and Clinton than between economic marginality or local economic dislocation and vote switching,” Reny et al. write. “In fact, we find marginally small or no associations between any of our economic indicators and vote switching in either direction.”

A 2018 demonstration in Chicago supporting the conviction of police officer Jason Van Dyke, who shot 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014. Joshua Lott/Getty Images

The Reny et al. findings may seem counterintuitive: How can people who wanted a black man to run the country somehow become attracted to Trump because of his racial demagoguery?

The unspoken premise behind this question is an assumption of a certain kind of white redemption narrative: By voting for Obama, white America exorcized its racial demons. But the truth is nothing of the sort. For one thing, Obama lost the white vote by 12 points in 2008 and 20 points in 2012.

For another, voting for Obama once or even twice doesn’t automatically mean that someone is not prejudiced against black people or immigrants. It’s possible to support Obama in particular while maintaining overall anti-black or anti-immigrant attitudes. In those cases, some other factor, like the Iraq War catastrophe or financial collapse, may have predominated over white voters’ racial hang-ups in the 2008 and 2012 election.

The 2016 election was different.

One reason is that Obama’s second term featured a significant amount of racial conflict. The Black Lives Matter movement was founded in 2013. The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and subsequent week of protest and unrest, kicked off a massive and racially polarizing national debate over police violence against African Americans.

A second reason is that Obama’s very presence in office was racially polarizing. Michael Tesler, a scholar at the University of California-Irvine, has documented in detail how Obama’s very presence in the White House polarized America along racial lines. It would make sense that this effect would grow stronger the longer Obama was in office, setting the stage for a major backlash in his final year.

Third, and arguably most importantly, the two candidates turned the election into a kind of referendum on American race relations. Trump kicked off his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and vowing to build a wall between the US and Mexico. He vowed to ban Muslims, and described black life in America as a hellscape of violence and poverty. Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign was not nearly so overt, which means it was less likely to attract voters who held latent racist and anti-immigrant attitudes.

Clinton, for her part, positioned herself as a champion of racial justice. While Obama’s rhetoric on race was typically post-racial, positioning the country as more united than divided, Clinton got out front on issues like police violence and immigration. There are plenty of valid reasons for this — Clinton was more worried about failing to turn out minority voters, Obama was more worried about alienating skittish whites, and there was no way to respond to Trump’s campaign without tackling race head-on.

The result, though, is that racial issues became the key political dividing line in a way they were not in either 2008 or 2012.

Now, Reny et al.’s statistical analysis can’t show all of this on its own. You should never draw conclusions this large from one statistical analysis, as it could suffer from any number of problems.

However, the basic analysis of the election is supported by a wide and deep body of research on the election, the vast majority of which shows that concerns about identity and race were the decisive issues in the 2016 election. This was true in the Republican primary and the general; it’s also consistent with research on far-right parties in Europe whose xenophobic appeals are similar to Trump’s. There is a complete lack of statistical evidence, by contrast, for the “economic anxiety” theory.

This analysis suggests that American politics are only likely to get more polarized on racial lines. Trump and Trumpism are, for the time being, the core of the Republican Party; the Republican message on race and immigration will match his as such. California Rep. Duncan Hunter, for example, is running a nakedly anti-Islam reelection campaign against Democratic challenger Ammar Campa-Najjar (who is a Mexican-Arab Christian by background).

The implications for American politics, both in 2018 and in the long term, could be significant. Remy et al. compare this period to the post-civil rights era, a period where the historically Democratic South transformed into modern-day red America primarily in backlash to the Democratic embrace of civil rights:

History suggests that significant changes in voting across party lines, particularly for the presidency, precede changes in party identities, the basis for realignments. This sequence of events played out during the Southern realignment (i.e., Democrats voting for GOP presidential candidates but maintaining their party attachment) and here we provide evidence that it may be happening again after two terms with a black president and during an era of mass demographic change due to immigration. Racial conservatives and those with the most punitive immigration views are moving right and were the most likely to switch to Trump in 2016. Our data suggest the same is happening in the opposite direction as those with racially liberal or pro-immigration views may be sorting into the Democratic Party.

This prediction may or may turn out to be accurate. But it’s plausible, and there’s no use burying our heads in the sand by pretending this is about class when it isn’t.

Original Source -> A new study reveals the real reason Obama voters switched to Trump

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newssplashy · 6 years

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(White House Memo)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has railed against unauthorized immigrants in recent days, branding many of them “murderers and thieves” who want to “infest our country.” Not long ago, he referred to them as “animals,” although he insisted he meant only those who join a violent gang.

The president’s unpresidential language has become the standard for some on his team. This week his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, made a mocking noise, “womp womp,” when a liberal strategist raised the case of a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome separated from her parents at the border.

Trump’s coarse discourse increasingly seems to inspire opponents to respond with vituperative words of their own. Whether it be Robert De Niro’s four-letter condemnation at the Tony Awards or a congressional intern who shouted the same word at Trump when he visited the Capitol this week, the president has generated so much anger among his foes that some are crossing boundaries that he himself shattered long ago.

The politics of rage that animated Trump’s political rise now dominate the national conversation, as demonstrated repeatedly during the debate over his “zero tolerance” immigration policy that separated children from parents apprehended at the border.

“Unfortunately, we’ve seen a decline in civility and an uptick in incivility,” said Christine Porath, a Georgetown University professor and author of “Mastering Civility,” a book on behavior in the workplace. “It seems like people are not only reciprocating, but we tend to stoop lower rather than higher. It’s really putting us in an unfortunate place.”

Porath said the current harsh climate was affecting people beyond politics, injecting itself into everyday life at home and work. “We know that incivility is contagious,” she said. “It’s like a bug or virus. It’s not only when people experience incivility, it’s when they see or read about it.”

Trump’s descriptions of those trying to enter the country illegally have been so sharp that critics say they dehumanize people and lump together millions of migrants with the small minority that are violent. This approach traces back to the day Trump first announced his campaign for president in 2015, when he labeled many Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” a portrayal that drew furious protests.

Trump recalled that controversy just this week and doubled down on it. “Remember I made that speech and I was badly criticized? ‘Oh, it’s so terrible, what he said,'” he said with derision during a speech to the National Federation of Independent Business on Tuesday. “Turned out I was 100 percent right. That’s why I got elected.”

Indeed, the lesson Trump took from his nastier-than-thou campaign was the more outrageous he was, the more incendiary his rhetoric, the more attention he drew and the more votes he received. Any expectation he would put the harsh language aside to become more of a moral leader as president has proved illusory.

He has made insults the core of his presidential messaging. He has called Canada’s prime minister “weak & dishonest.” He has called journalists, lawmakers and political opponents “wacky,” “crazy,” “goofy,” “mentally deranged,” “psycho,” “sleazy” and “corrupt.” He has called some of his own appointees and Republican allies “very bad,” “VERY weak,” “failed” and “lightweight.”

Returning incivility with incivility has not always worked out well for his opponents. When Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas tried it during the Republican primaries in 2016, it backfired.

“Only Trump can get away with being Trump,” said Jennifer Mercieca, an associate professor at Texas A&M University who has studied his language closely over the last three years.

“Any time that other people have tried to use ad hominem attacks or swear or whatever, it rings false,” she said. “And other politicians tend to have more shame, so when they’re criticized they fold. And as you know, Trump doesn’t do that. And so because he refuses to be shamed, he can get away with sort of saying anything.”

The emotional exchanges that feel so raw online play out in person too. Outside an arena in Duluth, Minnesota, where the president was speaking Wednesday night, protesters waved signs that said “My Grandpa Didn’t Fight Nazis for This” and “Liar. Racist. Fascist. Sociopath. Twitter Troll. Idiot.”

Supporters of the president responded with their own messaging. “Hillary Clinton Killed My Friends,” read a man’s T-shirt outside the rally, without explanation.

Gary Payne, who teaches sociology at Central Lakes College in Brainerd, Minnesota, said he opposed the president, his policies and also the trading of crude insults on both sides.

“People are looking for the simplest signals to go by,” Payne said as he stood outside the arena after trying unsuccessfully to attend the rally. “People pay more attention to demeanor than they do to policy.”

Harsh discourse in American politics did not begin with Trump, of course. Ugly language goes back to the fractious days of John Adams versus Thomas Jefferson through the years before the Civil War and eventually to the McCarthy era and Vietnam. But rarely has the president himself set the tone from the top in the way Trump does. When President George W. Bush called his challenger Bill Clinton a “bozo” in 1992, it was seen as unpresidential.

Trump’s presidency has driven some of those who oppose him to extremes of their own. Kathy Griffin, the comedian, was fired after posing for a picture in which she seemed to be holding Trump’s decapitated head. Samantha Bee, another comic, apologized for using a crude term to describe Ivanka Trump.

“WE SHOULD RIP BARRON TRUMP FROM HIS MOTHER’S ARMS AND PUT HIM IN A CAGE WITH PEDOPHILES AND SEE IF MOTHER WILL WILL STAND UP AGAINST” Trump, actor Peter Fonda wrote on Twitter, also using a vulgar term to describe the president. Fonda later deleted the tweet and apologized: “I went way too far. It was wrong and I should not have done it."

Such responses do not always go over well. “Donald Trump is a dilemma to his political opponents,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist. “It’s very easy for his political opponents to try to meet him on his level, and that usually backfires on his opponents.”

Some liberals bristle at the idea that they should hold back in the face of what they consider an inhumane or authoritarian presidency. Jessica Valenti, a columnist for Guardian U.S. and the author of multiple books on feminism, politics and culture, said restraint played into Trump’s hands.

“Expecting those of us who are scared and angry over what our country is becoming to speak with civility is absurd — civility died the day Trump took office,” she wrote. “It’s like telling a woman to smile as she’s being sexually harassed on the street: We’re not just supposed to put up with injustice, we’re meant to be cheerful through it, as well.”

One of the most sensitive debates generated by Trump’s family separation policy was the question of when Nazi comparisons are appropriate. When Michael V. Hayden, the former CIA director under President George W. Bush, posted a picture of a concentration camp and wrote, “Other governments have separated mothers and children,” it prompted an exchange on CNN with Wolf Blitzer, who noted that his relatives were murdered in the Holocaust.

“They were killed so when you make the comparison to Auschwitz, that’s such a powerful image and you understand the criticism you’re getting for that,” he told Hayden. “As bad as this policy is, it’s certainly not Auschwitz.”

“I fully understand,” Hayden replied, “and if that offended anyone, they have my deepest and most sincere apology.” He added that the blessings of a free society should not be taken for granted. “I knew it would be controversial, but I felt a warning flare was necessary.”

Two Holocaust survivors, however, posted a video testimonial this week talking about the impact of being separated from their parents. “Let’s be clear: We are not comparing what is happening today to the Holocaust,” they said in a statement. “But forcibly separating children from their parents is an act of cruelty under all circumstances.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said Wednesday that everyone “should be extremely careful” with Holocaust comparisons but that “there are disturbing parallels that have touched a nerve.”

“Let’s not spend time drawing comparisons,” he added. “Instead, we should focus all of our energy fighting for a more moral set of policies today.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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theliberaltony · 6 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

The key to resolving the impasse over immigration in Congress is getting the middle behind a deal — not the center of Congress overall, but rather the members of each party who are closest to the ideological center of their party. That won’t be easy. Looking at the bipartisan deal reached on the budget last week provides a possible path, but it’s probably a path that would involve angering those both on the right and the left of the immigration debate, making passing legislation fairly hard.

The roadblocks are clear. The Senate this week is starting formal consideration on immigration legislation. It’s not clear what bill, if any, will be approved by the Senate because there are at least three factions on immigration in that chamber alone: Senate Democrats, who basically just want legislation that extends the work permits and protection from deportation that was in President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program; a group of Senate Republicans like Arizona’s Jeff Flake who are also broadly supportive of DACA; and Republicans like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton who argue that any immigration bill creating a DACA law should also include new limits on family-based immigration.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has left open the possibility of a bill emerging from the Senate even if a majority of the chamber’s Republicans don’t back it.

The House is expected to hold a vote on immigration. But House Speaker Paul Ryan has hinted that he will not move forward on an immigration bill if it does not have the backing of the majority of House Republicans and has explicitly said any bill that he brings to the House floor must have the support of President Trump. That’s a much more narrow path than in the Senate, raising the possibility that — just as in 2013 — a Senate-passed immigration bill will die in the House.

So how could an immigration bill pass? I’m not sure the exact parameters of a bill that will satisfy all of these competing constituencies. So I’ll be watching the details of the legislation, but just as importantly, I’ll be watching the coalitions in Congress.

We just saw a two-year budget deal approved by both chambers and signed into law by Trump that calls for increased spending on some Democratic priorities (infrastructure, health care, etc.) and some things Republicans wanted (namely, defense). Immigration is obviously a different issue than the budget. But it’s worth looking at the vote count from last week as a guide to how bipartisan bills are approved in the current political environment.

First, let’s look at who voted against that deal: the leaders of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, more liberal Democrats in the House, several Senate Democrats considering running for president in 2020 and some of the more iconoclastic Republicans in the Senate (like Kentucky’s Rand Paul).

Who was in favor of the bill? In the House: 167 Republicans (a clear majority of the party’s 238-member caucus) along with 67 Democrats. In the Senate: 36 Democrats and 34 Republicans — an almost perfectly balanced bipartisan coalition.

That seems like the best bet for immigration, too. In other words, here’s what I think is not the path: the Senate’s 49 Democrats joining with about a dozen Republicans to pass a bill. There may be a dozen Republicans who would sign on to a Democrat-led bill for a DACA-style provision that includes increased border security funding. Indeed, getting to 12 might not even be all that hard, between more pro-immigration figures like Flake and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham; senators not running in a future GOP primary, like Flake and Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker; and those from more left-leaning states like Maine’s Susan Collins and Colorado’s Cory Gardner. But legislation with that kind of Democratic skew in the Senate — whatever the contents of the bill — is going to be viewed skeptically by Trump and the House.

Instead, in order to bring Trump and the House along, the Senate would likely have to put together a bill that drew a more balanced coalition. Such legislation would likely be opposed by Republicans like Cotton (who would feel it does not have enough immigration limits) but also liberal Democrats like California’s Kamala Harris (who would feel it includes too many more conservative provisions).

Who would vote in favor of this kind of compromise? Probably Democrats Mark Warner and Tim Kaine of Virginia but also Republicans like Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander and Missouri’s Roy Blunt, all of whom backed the budget deal. Those four are not leading figures in either party on immigration policy but rather veteran politicians who might be willing to vote for some kind of compromise on this issue.

In the House, getting to a majority of Republicans (so about 120) means getting support for the bill beyond the most liberal Republicans, or the 23 electorally vulnerable Republicans representing districts won by Hillary Clinton in 2016. Getting something like 67 Democrats (the number who voted for the government funding bill last week) requires Democratic support beyond the 12 members who represent districts that Trump won.

I suspect Trump will have a hard time opposing legislation that passes with strong bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress. It seems more likely that Ryan will advance a bill only if Trump views it favorably, and that most Republican senators will be leery of backing legislation that the president strongly opposes.

Policy matters here, of course, but maybe only in a broad sense. Immigration isn’t a dry budgetary matter; it’s an issue that animates partisans on both sides. No matter what the other details in the legislation are, how many Republicans in the House and Senate are willing to support a path to citizenship for more than 1 million undocumented immigrants? No matter how popular DACA recipients are, even among Republican voters, such a vote by a GOP incumbent probably increases the chances of losing in a primary to a conservative challenger.

How many Democrats in the House and Senate are willing to back a bill including some kind of new limits on immigration that is currently legal, either through cutting back on so-called diversity visas or family-based visas? Because of Trump’s rhetoric around these issues (“shithole” African countries and “rapists” from Mexico), backing immigration limits pushed by the president is likely to be cast by Democratic activists as codifying Trump’s racism into law.

Any deal on immigration that becomes law is likely to involve some members of both parties annoying their bases. Though it may be unlikely, such a deal could happen.

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blaqsbi · 8 months

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melindarowens · 6 years

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The Three Amigos

Today I read a column written by Lena Dunham that appeared in The New York Times. In it she expressed some trepidation about performing at a benefit for Hillary Clinton that was organized by Harvey Weinstein.

“I’m sorry I shook the hand of someone I knew was not a friend to women in my industry,” she wrote. “I wanted so desperately to support my candidate that I made a calculation.”

Harvey Weinstein contributed to and is a friend of Hillary.

There is now some pressure on Hillary to denounce Weinstein. The cup of irony runneth over. Hillary is married to a rapist and a serial abuser of women. Bill probably considers Weinstein’s transgressions to be the work of an amateur, because he got away with far worse. He even took advantage of a young intern in the Oval Office itself, but his leftist supporters still supported him. Hillary was instrumental in covering up her husband’s sexual misconduct and she even harassed many of Bill’s victims, yet Dunham enthusiastically supported her for president. That reeks with hypocrisy.

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Hollywood has long been filled with powerful men who don’t hesitate to take advantage of young, beautiful women. Woody Allen is an old pervert who surrounds himself with very young women in his movies. Roman Polanski can’t return to the U.S. due to rape charges. Bill Cosby drugged young starlets. The casting couch has been in use for a long time.

Weinstein’s career of sexual harassment is reprehensible, but many liberals in Hollywood went along to get along in order to gain employment and connections. It’s now too late for them to go into full virtue signaling mode.

—Ben Garrison

UPDATE: I drew this cartoon the night before more news came out about Weinstein’s pattern of sexual abuse against women. Why did it take so long for liberal Hollywood to denounce this man? Why didn’t they put on their pussy hats and march against him? They didn’t want their careers to take a hit, that’s why. Money and fame took precedence over morality.

Watch the mainstream media now try to weave Trump into this narrative of powerful men who abuse women. One problem for them, though. They have no facts to use against the president. Just lies.

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everettwilkinson · 6 years

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The Three Amigos

“I’m sorry I shook the hand of someone I knew was not a friend to women in my industry,” she wrote. “I wanted so desperately to support my candidate that I made a calculation.”

Harvey Weinstein contributed to and is a friend of Hillary.

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Watch the mainstream media now try to weave Trump into this narrative of powerful men who abuse women. One problem for them, though. They have no facts to use against the president. Just lies.

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junker-town · 7 years

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The Patriots have a Trump problem

The Patriots have the closest connection to the Republican president-elect of any NFL team. And many of their fans in liberal Massachusetts are having trouble reconciling their love for the team with their dislike of the man.

The Clinton-Kaine signs were still up on the afternoon of Dec. 24, sagging in the snow like tombstones of hope. They flashed by the windows as I drove through my hometown of Lincoln, Mass., where 77.7 percent of residents voted for Hillary Clinton. Hanging off porches behind some of the Clinton signs were New England Patriots flags.

For over a decade now, people outside of New England have reviled the Patriots for turning winning into a science and, many believe, cheating to do so. Pats fans doubled-down in response, and a fierce loyalty took root in Massachusetts that, through the sagas of Spygate and Deflategate, seemed unshakable.

But recently, that blind faith has faced its greatest test in the form of the team’s connection to Republican President-elect Donald Trump.

The trouble began when Patriots reporters spotted Brady with a Make America Great Again hat in his locker in Foxboro in the fall of 2015 (feels like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?), soon after Trump announced his candidacy and called Mexicans rapists in the same speech. Over the past year and a half, the team’s ties to Trump have only grown stronger.

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It isn’t shocking that Patriots fans would have trouble with this relationship: Massachusetts was the only state in the country where every county went for Hillary Clinton. Massachusetts does have counties that tend to be larger than those of other states, and some towns went for Trump — namely a band in central Massachusetts and a cluster near Rhode Island. But even most of the working class, white towns on Cape Cod and surrounding Boston voted for Clinton. She won 60.8 percent of the state. Trump took only 33.5 percent.

In fact, all of New England went for Clinton. And yet, the Patriots are the only team whose head coach, star quarterback, and wealthy owner have such a long-running, public relationship with the Republican president-elect, who’s one of the most divisive and fear-inspiring figures in the history of American politics.

Not all Massachusetts fans are bothered by the team’s Trump connection, of course — the Pats are still wildly popular. They were playing the Jets as I drove through town on Christmas Eve, and the streets were that particular kind of empty that falls over the state when a game is on. Driveways held extra cars. TVs flickered in windows.

But no matter how you feel about Trump or the Patriots, the truth is that one of the bluest states has the reddest team.

* * *

I was working for Boston.com when Deflategate started in early 2015. It felt like the non-scandal was all we wrote about and all anyone in Boston talked about for months — even obscure figures like U.S. District Court Judge Richard Berman, who ruled in Tom Brady’s favor, became heroes, supporting protagonists in a very boring sports thriller. I once overheard a few guys in a Boston bar raise their beers and toast, “TO JUDGE BERMAN!”

That righteous indignation only fueled the Pats-fans-against-the-world mentality that began to take shape after Spygate in 2007, when the NFL disciplined the team for videotaping the Jets' defensive coaches. Since then, it’s seemed like everyone outside of the L.L. Bean Boot-heavy (a company currently struggling with a Trump problem of its own) states thinks the Pats are cheaters. No one likes cheaters who win all the time.

Speaking badly about "Tommy" in Boston is like trashing the Pope when you're inside the Vatican: At best, sacrilegious. At worst, a death wish.

Patriots fans have therefore spent the past 10 years defending Brady, Belichick, and Kraft, the region’s holy trinity. Brady’s been a god since he and his chiseled jawline stepped onto the turf at Gillette Stadium almost 20 years ago and started proving all the haters wrong. Speaking badly about “Tommy” in Boston is like trashing the Pope when you’re inside the Vatican: At best, sacrilegious. At worst, a death wish.

And then came Trump.

I remember the shock that went around the internet when the hat pictures surfaced. Trump was largely still a joke then, so some thought that maybe Brady was just messing with the media. Others hoped someone had given the hat to him ironically and he hadn’t gotten rid of it yet.

That thinking turned out to be wishful: Brady went on to say it’d be “great” if his “friend” Trump won the election, and then later walked those comments back. Trump told The New York Times shortly thereafter: “Tom Brady is a great friend of mine. He's a winner and he likes winners.”

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In the NFL offseason, Bill Belichick’s girlfriend Linda Holliday posted an Instagram of herself and Belichick with Trump (she also posted a photo with Kid Rock, but I digress). This fall, Brady refused to denounce Trump’s “locker room talk” in a press conference, leaving the stage instead of addressing a reporter’s question regarding the tape in which Trump bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy.” Brady then spoke about how Trump has been his friend for 16 years (the two are golfing buddies) on Boston sports radio.

Brady declined to say who he’d vote for, but his wife, supermodel Gisele Bundchen, denied on Instagram that she and Brady would vote for Trump. The quarterback himself never went public with his choice, saying instead at a press conference that his wife told him not to talk about politics anymore.

The night before the election, Trump said that Brady and Belichick supported him, and read out loud a letter that Belichick wrote him — in which Belichick commended the candidate for doing doing a “tremendous” job — at a rally in New Hampshire. When asked about the letter, Belichick said that it was not politically motivated. On Nov. 16, a few days after the election, Kraft was seen entering Trump Tower in Manhattan.

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The Patriots aren’t the only figures in the NFL who’ve buddied up to Trump: Rex Ryan (R.I.P. his career with the Bills), for example, introduced the president-elect at a rally. There were many pieces written this fall about how many white players supported Trump.

But the Patriots’ relationship is different: It’s been the most public, and the team is one of the most popular and most successful franchises. They have, arguably, the most respected coach, a quarterback who is heading for — if he hasn’t already reached — G.O.A.T. status, and probably the second-most powerful owner in the NFL. They also have one of the top-five biggest fan bases in a top-five media market.

That media market also happens to be one of the most liberal. And the candidate the team is so connected to ran with the most non-liberal (and racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, Islamaphobic, etc.) rhetoric.

“It will forever color my opinion of the team. I will not watch, I will not buy any more jerseys. I’m done.”

Being a sports fan often means turning a blind eye to the political opinions and occasionally abysmal actions of your athletic heroes. Being a fan of any celebrity demands this — just ask anyone who listens to Kanye West. The 2016 election cycle, however, was decidedly not politics as usual. Trump’s whole campaign was littered with revelations — such as his refusing to rent apartments to black tenants decades ago, posting anti-Semitic memes, proposing a ban on Muslims from entering the country and forcing them to place themselves on a registry, bragging about sexually assaulting women — that would’ve prompted other politicians to withdraw from the race.

In the past, if a team’s politics didn’t align with those of its fan base, most fans could live with it. But the game got way uglier, and many people seem to be struggling: Fans flocked to Brady’s Facebook page the day Trump read the letter in New Hampshire to leave comments about how disappointed they were. Countless New England loyalists I’ve talked to over the past two months have told me that their idols are wobbling on their pedestals.

For some, they’ve shattered.

* * *

I was at a neighborhood holiday party in Lincoln a few days before Christmas, talking to the parents of several friends I grew up with. They asked about my job, so the conversation turned to sports. And then, naturally, to the Patriots. And then, naturally, to Trump.

“Oh, Susan Pease won’t even watch anymore,” one of my friend’s moms said. “She used to watch every Sunday with her family, and now she just can’t do it.”

I called Pease a few days later to ask her if this was true.

“Yeah, I just will not watch,” she said. “I really enjoy watching the game with my family. I like what it means for my family to sit down and talk and laugh and watch and snack and now ... I just, it’s just ruined for me. It’s not the worst thing about this, of course — this whole thing stems from my tremendous disappointment over this election and country. But it will forever color my opinion of the team. I will not watch, I will not buy any more jerseys. I’m done.”

Over the course of reporting this story, I’ve received countless emails and Facebook messages from people in Massachusetts telling me how disappointed they are in their team. Writing those letters almost seemed like catharsis for many: Several ended with sentiments along the lines of “it feels so good to get this off my chest,” and “I’ve been thinking about this so much.”

Some of these notes I got were filled with anger. People wrote things like “Fuck Brady,” and “I used to think Belichick was a genius and now I hate him,” and “I actually take delight when they lose.” Pease isn’t alone — at least six other people told me they can’t bear to watch Pats games anymore, either. A few told me that they were looking for a reason to give football up already because they find the NFL immoral and what it does to men’s bodies indefensible. Trump was the final straw that eliminated any feelings of loyalty.

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Many fans, however, are still watching games and rooting for the Pats. Joe Martini, who lives in Boston, grew up an ardent Patriots fan in Arlington, Mass., and voted for Trump, told me that Brady influenced his positive opinion of the candidate.

“I look at Brady's endorsement of Trump a little differently,” he said. “Some people who do not support Trump look at it as a knock on Brady, but I look at it as a great sign for the person Donald Trump is. If you look at the man Tom Brady presents himself as, and the values he tries to instill in teammates, many of them minorities, and his family, his wife is a Brazilian immigrant, I would have to imagine he sees those same values in Trump to support him.”

Even if, unlike Martini, fans were horrified by Trump himself, many told me that they respected everyone’s right to their own opinion. They worried that if they started holding Trump against Brady, they’d be going down a path of dividing an already divided country even more.

What most people on either side of the aisle did have a hard time stomaching, however, was Belichick’s violation of his own strict media policy. Even though we don’t know who Belichick voted for — or if he voted at all — some fans saw his letter to Trump as a blatant violation of the one rule he’s always preached: No distractions.

“When Belichick takes a stance on the need to be focused, on ‘doing your job,’ and then when it’s convenient for him to do something that serves him and a friendship with Donald Trump, he does it? That’s a betrayal from a fan’s perspective.”

In fact, the language in the letter seemed so out of character that people had trouble believing it was real at first. I certainly did — I made a joke on Twitter that Belichick wrote all of my college letters of recommendation when the story broke because I found it so strange. My phone blew up as friends texted me that they were sure Trump wrote the letter himself. Belichick, they reasoned in a panic, is famously gruff and short. He wouldn’t use Trump-specific words like “tremendous,” nor would he dare break his own ethos.

But Belichick did. He wrote the letter, doesn’t appear to have told Trump he couldn’t read it out loud (Brady, however, implied at a press conference that maybe he hadn’t given Trump permission to speak about him that night), and then defended it.

Enjoyed dinner at Mar-a-Lago this evening with our good friend Donald Trump

A photo posted by Linda Holliday✨ (@lindaholliday_) on Mar 5, 2016 at 8:25pm PST

Fans found this situation wildly hypocritical. Jeff Kirchick, a die-hard Pats fan from Massachusetts who now lives in New York City, took the letter particularly hard.

“In their personal time, a lot of these guys probably do a lot of things I don’t agree with,” said Kirchick. “That’s not my business. But what they do on the field is my business. It’s what I watch.

“So when Belichick takes a stance on the need to be focused,” he continued, “on ‘doing your job,’ and then when it’s convenient for him to do something that serves him and a friendship with Donald Trump, he does it? That’s a betrayal from a fan’s perspective. When it serves him, he can do that, but when the media has questions about relevant things to the game he dismisses them and shuns them because we need to ‘stay focused on the next opponent.”

The distractions, Kirchick believes, hurt the actual game the Patriots were playing: The week of the election, the team lost to the Seahawks. It was close, but New England’s defense couldn’t stop Doug Baldwin and Russell Wilson in the fourth quarter and also couldn’t answer with points of their own. It was one of only two losses in the regular season, and the only game Tom Brady failed to win in 2016.

* * *

It’s hard to have a conversation about the Patriots without talking about Trump anymore. The connection reverberates far beyond the place I grew up.

I watch it happen online all the time. I’ve written about the Patriots a fair amount in the past few weeks as the NFL playoffs got underway. The piece that got the most views was about how I hope we have a Patriots-Cowboys Super Bowl. I looked at the article a few days after it published and saw it had 235 comments. Even though I didn’t mention Trump at all in the piece, before I scrolled down to the read the comments, I knew they’d be about the team’s connection to him.

They were. Some people were defending the Pats, saying everyone’s entitled to their own opinion. Others declared they hated New England even more now because they were aligned with a monster. Others were saying, “who cares?” Most of the comments quickly derailed — as comments are wont to do — into a fierce debate about politics with very little mention of football.

No matter how anyone feels about the team or the president-elect, the two have become as woven into each other’s histories as Trump’s hair is to his head. The difference is that while the rest of the country doesn’t really have a stake in this connection, Patriots fans in liberal Massachusetts who find Trump abhorrent have to grapple with the emotional implications. Patriotism in the age of Trump, it turns out, is a tricky thing to navigate.

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