Obama By The Numbers

Make America great again? The last guy pretty much did that.

Unemployment rate
Jan 1, 2001: 4.2%
Jan 1, 2009: 7.8%
Jan 1, 2017: 4.9%

Consumer confidence
Jan 2001: 94.7
Jan 2009: 60.1
Nov 2016: 93.8

GDP (2016 dollars)
Q4 2000: 14.32 trillion
Q4 2008: 16.37 trillion
Q3 2016: 18.68 trillion

Median household income (2015 dollars)
2000: $57,790
2008: $55,376
2015: $56,515

Dow Jones
Jan 2001: 15,002
Jan 20, 2009: 7,949
Jan 20, 2017: 19,822

States gaining nuclear weapons
Clinton: 2
Bush: 1
Obama: 0

Percentage without health insurance
2008: 16.8%
2009: 16.8%
2016: 10.5%

Approval when leaving office (Gallup)
Clinton: 66%
Bush: 34%
Obama: 58%
Trump today: 40%

How Salutary Will Be the Interference?

It's as if James Madison, writing in March 1788, was using some device to peer 228 years into the future when he wrote the following in Federalist 63.

"[T]here are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn."

"In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind?”

How salutary (beneficial) the interference--that is the question, isn't it? Safe to say, already, 39 days before inauguration day, that Trump will not sane-up and spare the republic this challenge.

Trump: It's About Power, Not Truth

When I was on a year abroad in Varanasi twenty years ago, we used to play a lot of games. Rock, paper, scissors was easily the most brutal. It is, fundamentally, a game of dominance. When you play it over and over again, you begin to see the psychological habits of your foes; use that advantage and you can crush a person's spirit by beating them so often.

One of the guys on the fellowship with us relayed the experience he had playing it in college. The variant they played came from Asia, and the symbol for paper was "chi." There's this common mistake players make, where the symbol for paper and scissors scramble in the brain and you end up doing a kind of Spock gesture. In Syed's gaming group, the "banned Spock chi" was permissible in one circumstance: if you knew that the other player was going for rock you could announce "banned Spock chi" as you were playing the gesture as a way of committing a kind of coup de grâce to finish off a particularly pathetic foe. It was the move of ultimate dominance, because you were announcing your move ahead of time. It was a brutal way to go down.

This is the game Donald Trump is playing with his foes, and we don't realize it. Members of the media and the left have been mystified why Trump can behave so outrageously without consequence. He lies, he offends, he surrounds himself with sycophants, incompetents, and nuts, he loses his shit. Why don't the normal rules apply to him?, we wonder. It's because he's not playing by normal rules. Josh Marshall has been discussing this for months, and others have touched on it as well, but it was Masha Gessen was speaking on On the Media that it really hit home. 

In autocracies (particularly Putin's, with which she is most familiar), the valence of speech is entirely different. It is not used to communicate meaning in the conventional sense. It is used to project power and authority. One of the most effective ways to do that is to violate norms. Lying transparently, making bigoted comments, attacking people in public--these are incredibly effective ways of demonstrating your dominance. The real message is: I have just lied, we both know this was a lie, and you are powerless to do anything about it. When Trump does this, he's saying "banned Spock chi!" to America.

This is precisely the reason people support Trump. They understand this power play and delights them. They delight in it partly because there is nothing we can do about it, but also because the people to whom it's being done don't even realize what's happening. We don't understand the rules. The media dutifully reports Trump news as if he were playing by the old rules rather than running a propaganda war. Trump wants to jail people who burn the flag? Doesn't he realize this is unconstitutional? Let's have five think pieces that discuss whether this is viable, what Texas vs. Johnson tells us, and oh yeah, what about that time Hillary proposed a law against flag-burning? 

Trumpies must have found this response highly amusing.

We are relying on norms and institutions to navigate the Trump years, and we must--they distinguish functioning democracies from dysfunctional autocracies. But that doesn't mean we should continue to extend Trump the same deference we do other leaders. He is attempting an entirely undemocratic power play (for reasons we don't yet understand), and our failure to understand it only enables him. This is a dangerous moment.

The GOP Loses if Trump Wins

Buried beneath all the drama and ugliness of this election is a truth I don't think many people have examined: if Trump wins the election on Tuesday, it's going to be very bad for Republicans' prospects as a viable party long term. Whether they win or lose, fundamental realities of their fractured coalition will call that question eventually, but if Trump loses, the Party will hang together as an oppositional force against Hillary Clinton.

The malignancy of the Trump campaign did not seriously fracture Republican support of the candidate, because with Clinton members all had a common enemy. With a President Clinton, the Party can turn again to a common enemy. We'll see skirmishes for power in the House, but the ultimate endgame--gridlock, endless investigations, a potential impeachment--will paper over divisions. Republicans in the Senate will likely be a minority, and they'll turn to procedural rules to impede the body's function. Nothing rallies the base so fast as the prospect of a good impeachment.

During the Obama era, Republicans honed their skill at outrage and obstruction, the key pillars of any effective opposition party. With none of their actual policy goals at stake, it was easy to stay united. But if Trump wins, the GOP can't stay an oppositional Party. It would, in the event of a Trump win, almost certainly, hold all levers of government. Policy accomplishments now become the prize of power, and realizing them will expose the warring factions' differing goals. Once a strong coalition of a corporate donor class, religious conservatives, and neoconservatives, a post-Trump GOP would be guided by Trumpies (fueled by racial grievance, in favor of social welfare programs, and opposed to trade and foreign adventures). The voter base that supports these positions was drawn from the previous coalitions, leaving them all weaker--and in the case of the donor class and neoconservatives, in direct conflict with the base.

Since the Nixon era, the GOP has managed to use white resentment as a way of cementing power among these groups. Trump's campaign made the implicit explicit, and he ran on a platform of white supremacy. That demon, once loosed to the public, can't be quietly ignored while the GOP's usual business--tax cuts, a war on abortion, deregulation and promotion of corporate rights, war--come back to the fore. People want a wall, they want Muslims out of their communities, they want trade deals nullified, they want "illegals" deported. Most of these things are anathema to standard-issue Republicans.

There might be a few issues they could come together on, like guns, abortion, and coal, but these are mostly not the groups' top issues. Worse, issues like nullifying Obamacare are riven with danger, since the GOP's misinformation campaign has obscured all the benefits people have under its provisions. But it's more likely that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell will push the issues they always have--massive tax cuts for the wealthy, new trade deals (it's high on the party platform), re-deregulate Wall Street, cutting future benefits to Social Security and Medicare, and radically slashing social programs. None of these things will be popular with the Trumpie base, and where will all that white resentment go if the GOP don't immediately pander to it?

Then there's the issue of Trump as president. It is frankly inconceivable to think of a non-catastrophic Trump administration. The best-case scenario is a shadow government headed by traditional GOP elites, perhaps lead by Mike Pence. Even in that scenario, it's impossible to imagine President Trump not saying things that embarrass the party and enrage allies. There are many scenarios of disaster--too many to speculate on.

After a year of in-fighting and bad leadership, the midterm elections would force the divisions wide open. Primary challengers will emerge both for and against the Trump loyalists. If Trump loses, the Party can forestall the reckoning. (Maybe.) But if he wins, the reckoning begins in a few weeks' time, as the coalitions gear up to seize power. No one is thinking about this now, but I don't see how any other outcome is possible. The Republican Party might survive a Trump candidacy; surviving a Trump presidency will be much, much harder.

The Peaceful Transition of Power

Al Gore, December 13, 2000:

Almost a century and a half ago, Senator Stephen Douglas told Abraham Lincoln, who had just defeated him for the presidency, "Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I'm with you, Mr. President, and God bless you." Well, in that same spirit, I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country. Neither he nor I anticipated this long and difficult road. Certainly neither of us wanted it to happen. Yet it came, and now it has ended, resolved, as it must be resolved, through the honored institutions of our democracy.

Over the library of one of our great law schools is inscribed the motto, "Not under man but under God and law." That's the ruling principle of American freedom, the source of our democratic liberties. I've tried to make it my guide throughout this contest, as it has guided America's deliberations of all the complex issues of the past five weeks. 

Now the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it. I accept the finality of this outcome which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession. I also accept my responsibility, which I will discharge unconditionally, to honor the new President-elect and do everything possible to help him bring Americans together in fulfillment of the great vision that our Declaration of Independence defines and that our Constitution affirms and defends.

Donald J. Trump, last night at the third Presidential debate:

 I will look at it at the time. I’m not looking at anything now, I'll look at it at the time. What I've seen, what I’ve seen, is so bad. First of all, the media is so dishonest and so corrupt and the pile on is so amazing. "The New York Times" actually wrote an article about it, but they don't even care. It is so dishonest, and they have poisoned the minds of the voters. But unfortunately for them, I think the voters are seeing through it. I think they’re going to see through it, we’ll find out on November 8th, but I think they’re going to see through it.

If you look at your voter rolls, you will see millions of people that are registered to vote. Millions. This isn't coming from me. This is coming from Pew report and other places. Millions of people that are registered to vote that shouldn't be registered to vote. So let me just give you one other thing. I talk about the corrupt media. I talk about the millions of people. I'll tell you one other thing. She shouldn't be allowed to run. It’s -- She's guilty of a very, very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run, and just in that respect I say it's rigged because she should never have been allowed to run for the presidency based on what she did with e-mails and so many other things.

Wallace (moderator): But, sir, there is a tradition in this country, in fact, one of the prides of this country is the peaceful transition of power and no matter how hard fought a campaign is that at the end of the campaign, that the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying you're necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you're not prepared now to commit to that principle? 

Trump: What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I'll keep you in suspense, okay?

One of these figures is a patriot who puts the country first, and one is a dangerous narcissist who would be willing to create a constitutional crisis because of wounded vanity.

Donald Trump Was So Much Worse in the Second Debate Than You Imagined

I was so staggered by what I saw in the second presidential debate that it's taken me nearly 24 hours to process it. Even now, I've probably failed to absorb the true meaning of what transpired. What we saw was a man on the edge of a mental health collapse, someone who could not contain his rage and who babbled incoherently when he wasn't trying to purely menace Hillary Clinton. It was a town hall-style debate, and (bizarre) form has it that the candidates are expected to wander the stage. At one point, Hillary passed close enough to Trump that I though he was going to physically attack her.

What exactly is Trump trying to do here while Hillary is answering a question. #debate pic.twitter.com/caXu9ZBVrE

— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) October 10, 2016

But the psychometrics of the debate were actually the secondary concern. Rather, what really stunned were the two most disqualifying statements ever made by a presidential candidate. It's important to separate these various strands out. Trump is creepy, by his own account a sexual predator, and a racist of the first order. But we've had slave-owners as presidents, war criminals, and almost certainly sexual predators. This makes them moral monsters, but it didn't threaten the republic. Trump's most shocking moments last night were not his defense of bragging about sexual assault--it was these three answers, which demonstrate how dangerously incurious and ignorant he is. He probably shouldn't even be allowed to tour the White House, much less reside there.

Let's consider these in ascending order of outrageousness. 

1. Ignorance of basic government functions
 The following exchange, which I'll edit for brevity, went like this:

Trump: Hillary Clinton has friends that want all of these provisions, including, they want the carried interest provision, which is very important to Wall Street people, but they really want the carried interest provision, which I believe Hillary is leaving, and it's very interesting why she is leaving carried interest

Clinton: Well, here we go again. I have been in favor of getting rid of carried interest for years starting when I was a senator from New York. But that's not the point here.
Trump: Why didn't you do it? Why didn’t you do it?

Clinton: Because I was a senator with a Republican president.

Trump: You could have done it. If you were an effective senator, you could have done it. But you were not an effective senator.

Clinton: You know, under our constitution, presidents have something called veto power.

The man who would become President hasn't the vaguest idea of how government functions. The exchange above would be barely forgivable if you overheard it over the Thanksgiving turkey, but it's inexcusable in a presidential nominee. Making laws in the US is a bastard because there are dozens of squeeze points from the moment a bill is introduced to committee until it survives a veto from a president. It's far harder in the US than nearly any other modern democracy, and negotiating this minefield means, at the barest minimum, understanding how it functions. This is like hiring an illiterate to be editor of the New Yorker.

2. Jailing your political opponents
The second disqualifying moment, and surely the most shocking moment in politics in my lifetime, was when Trump casually ad-libbed a threat to jail Clinton.

But if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation. Because there has never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it. And we’re gonna have a special prosecutor. When I speak, I go out and speak, the people of this country are furious. In my opinion, the people that have been long time workers at the FBI are furious. There has never been anything like this where e-mails, and you get a subpoena. You get a subpoena, and after getting the subpoena you delete 33,000 e-mails and then you acid wash them or bleach them, as you would say. Very expensive process. So we’re gonna get a special prosecutor and we’re gonna look into it. Because you know what, people have been -- their lives have been destroyed for doing 1/5 of what you have done. And it’s a disgrace, and honestly, you oughta be ashamed of yourself. 

Following the GOP convention in July, I wrote about the danger of transgressing norms in a democracy, arguing that these norms, far more than written law, are what keep a democracy intact.

No, what's remarkable is that he has shattered the norms that govern politics. Societies function not because of formal laws, but because of unwritten agreements. It's the way civilized people navigate the world. These unwritten agreements undergird government function, and critically. In 2000, Al Gore acceded to the nakedly political (and internally inconsistent) fiat by the Supreme Court that installed Bush as president. In functioning governments, the judiciary's rule is sacrosanct--if it is nothing but a rubber stamp to the party in office, then there's really no law. Once one branch defies another, things fall apart. And there's no law that says they can't defy each other. Had Gore said, "Nah, I don't accept it. Democrats, stand with me as we continue to fight this battle," things could have gone sideways very fast.

 Since that convention, the calls of "lock her up" have become a common feature of Trump rallies, and he has in the past few weeks spoken darkly of how he might contest a loss because of the "rigged" election he anticipated. This is all no doubt a function of his mental health problems; his narcissism is so profound he cannot think in terms beyond his own personal good. Even as he began crashing in the polls following the first debate and provoked dozens of elected Republicans to forsake him after the sexual assault video, he has never considered the Republican Party. Now individual Republicans are stuck with a doomed choice--stick with Trump and lose all independents and swing voters, or abandon him and lose the base. It is now hard to see how the election doesn't turn into a massive electoral debacle for the Party.

We should have no sympathy for them, though, because they courted this obviously deranged, racist incompetent because they mistakenly thought it would be good for their prospects. Trump, flailing last night, was ugly and incoherent as usual, and the reviews this morning are catastrophic. The fear that he might actually win are diminishing very fast. That should not assuage our anxiety about how fragile our democracy is, nor make us feel any more sanguine about the Republicans who nearly elevated him to the presidency (by which I mean nearly every Republican, since only a handful opposed him from the start). Things in the body politic are not healthy, and though we survived this scare, we shouldn't be feeling too relieved yet.

October Surprise

Next April, David Fahrenthold will win at least one Pulitzer for his work--basically solo--of investigating the train wreck that is the life of Donald Trump. Yesterday afternoon he posted an article containing a three minute video that, 24 hours later, looks like it will bring down what remains of the Trump campaign. In the video, Trump is caught telling Access Hollywood host Billy Bush (first cousin of W., nephew of GW) a bunch of pretty horrible stuff, the worst of which is boasting about sexual assault:

“And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy; you can do anything.”

Politico's top stories.

We have this perennial specter of the "October surprise," but in my lifetime, only one incident--Iran announcing the release of the American hostages in late 1980--really qualifies. By October, the trajectory of an election is established and very little can happen that will upset the dynamics. The US has the longest elections in the world, and by October of an election year, candidates will have been actively running for 18 months. We know who they are.

In the 24+ hours since the videotape went public, the GOP has basically imploded. At current count, eight pols have reversed their endorsements and twenty more have called for Trump to step aside. Donors and party mandarins are trying to figure out how to dump Trump. Republican women are apoplectic. It's not entirely clear what the next few days hold, but it is at this point impossible to imagine the GOP putting this mess back together. The only question is what the wreckage ultimately turns out to be.

But here's the thing. Let's (cue Little Marco) dispense with the notion that the GOP didn't know what it was doing; it knew exactly what it was doing.

The Republican Party has been heading for a crisis of its own making for two decades. The precursors were a toxic stew deliberately chosen for short term gain. They were never sustainable. Let us review:

• Racism. Since Nixon, the GOP has favored the post-civil rights "Southern strategy" (unspoken racism), which led it to a demographic blind alley. By the mid-1970s, when the Southern strategy was in full-swing, whites were an overwhelming majority of the electorate. But playing to white grievance means alienating nonwhites and works only so long as whites have that overwhelming majority. LBJ famously said the Dems had lost the South for a generation following civil rights, but, in implementing the Southern strategy, the GOP lost nonwhites for a generation, too. And that generation is now a much larger portion of the electorate--and the generation is only beginning.
• The enemy is government. In his first inaugural in 1981, Reagan created the first tenet of modern conservatism: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." It sent the Republicans on a war with government that undermined the authority of their own leaders. Contempt for competence became a badge of honor. For a long time, Republican leaders used this idea to undermine technocratic Democrats, but they failed to see that it would lead to a moment when their own authority was the target of the contempt they'd nurtured.
• Contempt for Media and the Alternative Conservative Reality. Beginning with talk radio in the early 90s, Fox News in 1996, and then the internet and social media in the 2000s, Republicans built an information bubble that consisted of only right-wing talking points. Going back to the earlier part of the 20th century, with Father Coughlin and later the John Birch Society, conservatives always courted conspiracy. By arguing that the mainstream press was liberal and in on the conspiracy to suppress real (and to liberals, damaging) news, conservatives were able to build an alternative reality that included everything from Drudge and Fox news to Conservapedia, the right wing answer to Wikipedia. It is impenetrable and self-sustaining.

We could point to several more deliberate strategies the GOP put in place as short-term tactics to advance their elective ambitions, but these three are sufficient to explain the rise of Trump, a nakedly racist, know-nothing businessman who has never held any public office. When you look at the strategic decisions men like Nixon, Gingrich, and Rove made to consolidate Republican power, a Trump-like figure was inevitable. The only thing surprising about this October's revelations are that they didn't come out sooner.

Trump is  toast in 2016, but Trumpism will live on. It has been deliberately bred and nurtured by the Republican Party since the 1960s, and over 50 million people will show up to endorse it when they vote for Trump. Those 50m people are the hardcore base of the Republican Party, and they aren't going to be wooed back to business as usual with the warmed-over run of a Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. Elites in the GOP always cultivated the racism, ignorance, and conspiracies with a wink, thinking that after each election, they could carry on with the usual program of tax cuts and corporate deregulation. Trump has forced the party into a reckoning they have attempted to delay for years.

The reckoning is here and there's no going back. When we look back on these 24 hours, I suspect we'll see them as the moment the GOP shattered and was forced to become a different party.

Trump Loses His Marbles

There's not a whole lot of analysis a person can add to the week Donald Trump just delivered as the post-convention nominee of a major party except to say that it is almost a dead certainty we'll never see another candidate go this crazy again. By way of comparison, famous gaffes in the past included Gerald Ford's claim that the Soviets did not control Poland, the Dean "scream," Dan Quale correcting a child by spelling potato "potatoe," and Rick Perry forgetting the third federal department he'd eliminate. The bar for gaffes was so high that when Al Gore sighed in a debate against George W., it was considered a massive blunder. Keep these benchmarks in mind as we rewind the tape on what happened in the days following the end of the Democratic National Convention.

Another quirk that might be unique to this moment is the habit of Trump's tweets, which seem to pick up during his agitated moments. He tends to have on days and off days of tweeting, but in a typical week, he'll average about six or seven tweets a day. From July 7-13, he posted fifty tweets.  In the week starting immediately after the DNC (Friday July 29) and culminating the following Thursday, the period of time encompassing the disastrous week, he posted 105 tweets. What's more, in the midst of his serious derangement, the tweets were coming in the wee hours (beginning at 4:10am on the 1st, 3:24am on the 2nd, and 2:14am on the 3rd), making me wonder how much sleep-deprivation was a factor in his bizarre behavior.

All right, to the tape. These may not be in chronological order, and I'm not indicating the dates or including links because of the sheer volume of gaffes to document.

•  Khizr Kahn, whose son was killed in Iraq in 2004, called Trump out at the DNC. Trump began by attacking Kahn personally:

I was viciously attacked by Mr. Khan at the Democratic Convention. Am I not allowed to respond? Hillary voted for the Iraq war, not me!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 31, 2016

• He then suggested that Kahn's wife, Ghazala, was silenced during his speech for unknown anti-muslim reasons. (It turned out she was too distraught to speak.)
• After receiving a gift of a purple heart, said it was a lot easier to get one that way. This and the Khan stuff enraged many veterans and veteran organizations. 
• Told George Stephanopoulos that Russia would not invade Ukraine and was startled when George told him they had already annexed Crimea.
• Also Stephanopoulos that the NFL had sent him a letter complaining about conflicts between presidential debates and games. The NFL had sent no such letter and announced so soon after.
• Said he'd tell his daughter that if she were sexually harassed at work, she should quit.
• Accused two different fire marshals of keeping people out of rallies for "political reasons"--even though the campaign had already agreed to caps on attendance.
• He called Hillary Clinton "the Devil" (my fave).
• He warned that the election would "be rigged." Later, asked how he knew, said he "could feel it."
• When a baby started crying at one of his rallies, he began by praising her and children in general. A minute later, he kicked her out.
• He took a ton of heat from other Republicans for his Khan madness, and he returned the favor by saying he wouldn't endorse Paul Ryan, John McCain, or Kelly Ayotte. (He eventually did endorse them.) This was actually the final straw for GOP chair Reiknce Priebus, who melted down.
• Told Americans to pull their 401(k)'s out of the stock market.
• He declared he wouldn't necessarily back NATO partners if they were attacked.

But Al Gore sighed!

Great afternoon in Ohio & a great evening in Pennsylvania - departing now. See you tomorrow Virginia! pic.twitter.com/jQTQYBFpdb

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 2, 2016

Trump and the Decline of White America

So many white people...

I've spent the best part of the past year trying to figure out the Trump phenomenon. How does a man this manifestly incompetent, ignorant, and offensive command so much support in the United States in 2016? There is clearly a racial component, but what Trump speaks for is not 1950s racism. It's race-adjacent, but not strictly racist. The distinction is subtle but important.

Instead, what's happening is the death rattle of normative white culture--that is, the assumption that everything in society will be filtered through the cultural lens of the typical 55-year-old white male. It's not just that he will look out and mainly see white faces, it's that he will have his cultural values and preferences reflected back to him. In this way it's a kind of narcissism. Racism is directed outward--it's an attack on very real people. What Trumpies are experiencing is cultural dissonance, and it's personal and inward-looking. They're nostalgic, they express a longing for a time when they were "free" to think and behave without filter.

This is why Trump and his followers are so fixated on "political correctness." At the gross level, for the first time in American history, it's not mainstream to be racist, homophobic, and misogynist. All of these positions are reflective of a time when white, Christian culture was the national default. A long time ago it became uncool to voice these things publicly, but the were still minority views, marginalized positions. Racist, homophobic whites could still joke about fags and niggers in private and not offend people. In the last decade, these things became the majority view. Most Americans find these terms offensive, and anyone using them risks public scorn.


But it's more subtle than just bigotry. The world is confusing when norms change--when people say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. Respect for Latino and black culture, for non-Christians, and for non-straights has become the majority view. Drop an n-bomb now, and you court censure in all but the most insular settings. Trumpies want the freedom to use whatever language is comfortable without being social pariahs. This is one of the lost "freedoms."

Of course, this is not a change politicians can affect. They're bigger social changes. It is employees in department stores that say Happy Holidays, not the guy at the DMV. Whites of a certain generation expect to be paid deference, but the world seems to be spiting them. In the America of 2016, it's fine to be gay or transsexual, Muslims and Jews are accorded respect, women are often the boss, and signs are in English and Spanish.

Trump constantly talks about weakness. "We're so weak, nobody respects us." This is a big theme for Trump. It has seemed an odd critique. Actually, we're stronger now than we have been twenty years--crime is down, unemployment is down, the economy is fine, we all have smart phones, and soon we'll all be watching TV on Oculus Rift. The weakness Trump has identified, though, has to do with this loss status. Who cares if you have an iPhone if everyone's calling you a racist all the time?

Trump's entire message is one of white restoration--there's basically nothing else there. He doesn't have policies per se, just vague promises that things will be great again. (Believe me.) Nonwhite America says, "what do you mean 'again,' white man?" For anyone who wasn't white and probably male, that normative culture was a terrible thing. (It's even possible for whites to see it as a terrible thing even though they benefited.) Good riddance.

A final irony about this election is that even the election itself is a last gasp example of normative whiteness. We have elevated and enlarged Trump's status because we always see things through the lens of whiteness. And he is indeed huge with whites. But he's never passed about 40-42% in the polls (the tightening has to do with Hillary's fall). I suspect most Americans think that he's dominating among poor voters. After all, big part of his message is predicated on jabbing the "elites," and this is how the media dutifully frames it. But of course he's not winning among the poor. He's winning among the poor whites. Overall, Hillary is doing way better among people earning less than $50,000. That white cultural view still has valence--there's still evidence of it all around--but it's receding.

This is why the Trump phenomenon contains a bright light at its core. The very existence of Trump demonstrates is that this view is dying. You only run on the platform of white restoration when something needs restoring. And not only is it not getting restored, it's going away. Trumpism isn't the spark of a new movement, it's the ember of a dying one. Thirty percent of the electorate is nonwhite, and that number grows each year. Nonwhites are being born at a faster rates than whites, and whites are dying at a faster rate than nonwhites. We will be a majority nonwhite country by 2044.

But even that fails to get at the truth of things. Culturally, we quit being a white country a while ago. Donald Trump is not going to change that.

Witnessing The GOP Convention

The Last three days have been some of the most interesting (and scary) I've experienced as a politics-watcher (a period that goes back to 1976, when I was eight). The whole Trump deal, from his actions as a candidate to the events of this week's convention, have been staggering. Unprecedented.

What's been so remarkable to me is not just Trump and his manifest incompetence and ignorance. He is a piece of work, but he is only an extension of the same pathologies we've seen emerge in figures like Sarah Palin--the naked racism, contempt for knowledge and expertise, and that shocking melange of arrogance, incompetence, and ignorance. He's not different from Palin, he's just a more concentrated version of all the same qualities.

No, what's remarkable is that he has shattered the norms that govern politics. Societies function not because of formal laws, but because of unwritten agreements. It's the way civilized people navigate the world. These unwritten agreements undergird government function, and critically. In 2000, Al Gore acceded to the nakedly political (and internally inconsistent) fiat by the Supreme Court that installed Bush as president. In functioning governments, the judiciary's rule is sacrosanct--if it is nothing but a rubber stamp to the party in office, then there's really no law. Once one branch defies another, things fall apart. And there's no law that says they can't defy each other. Had Gore said, "Nah, I don't accept it. Democrats, stand with me as we continue to fight this battle," things could have gone sideways very fast.

The GOP has been nibbling at the edges of this kind of norm-flouting for years. Obama's got the constitutional right to have his Supreme Court nominee considered by the Senate, but they've refused. Earlier, they shut government down as a negotiation ploy for their preferred policies. They impeached Clinton. They questioned Obama's legitimacy and legal right to be president. But in every case, there was an acknowledgement that certain lines of conduct couldn't be reasonably transgressed. There were lines, even if they wanted to push them to the limit.

Not anymore! Trumpism means letting your freak flag fly. Like rebels in a developing country, they call not only for their political opponent's jailing, but sometimes even her death. (An elected official in New Hampshire--and an advisor to the Trump campaign--did that yesterday.) It means constructing grievances over things that are not happening. In Trump-world, everyone is red-faced because Obama has diminished the US's standing in the world (false), because he has illegally used executive decisions to thwart Congress (false, but a necessary rhetorical precursor for a party that means to ignore the rule of law), because the economy is collapsing (false), that jobs are all gone (false), that Hillary Clinton is a criminal and murderer (false, as if it even needs to be said). A speaker at the Republican National Convention did indeed literally call Clinton a murderer.

All this grievance (and it's clearly authentic; these people are melting down in real anger) means the folks at the convention, and in the GOP generally, feel that they can break all norms and cross all lines. The Democrats, by this line of thinking, are the ones who crossed the lines. Any reprisal is justified. The Democrats are the ones who flout the law; they are the ones who have nominated a criminal. We have to stop them for the greater good. The ends justify our means.

Last year I could see how the GOP would elect Trump. He is floridly bad, but he's not entirely different from other Republican politicians.  I couldn't see how he'd open the door to the GOP's darkest fantasies and paranoias and that we'd be witnessing such a shocking inversion of political norms. Social scientists say we all have "thresholds" of appropriate behavior. When riots start, people's thresholds collapse, and they become capable of behavior they would normally never engage in. Trump was the riotmaster. He keeps egging his followers on, lowering their threshold for bizarre behavior.


All of this has culminated in a convention in which a former candidate for president (Chris Christie) put Hillary Clinton on a show trial, and which the constant call-and-response refrain is "lock her up." In politics, once you delegitimize  your political adversaries, you'd dropped the threshold--measured by adherence to unwritten rules of conduct--and justified any action you take. This is how third world countries lurch from coup to coup and devolve into constant wave of civil war. We're obviously not immediately devolving into civil war, but we're also not standing on the same firm ground we enjoyed in 2000. (Indeed, imagine an election that close happening this year; would you rely on the GOP to stand down in identical circumstances? Of course they wouldn't.)

That I did not foresee.

Trump and the Brexit

When the vote for the UK's referendum on exiting the EU--the Brexit--was finally called, it was around 8:30 pm on a Thursday, West Coast time. That gave the media just long enough to think about the implications to have solidified one common point by the morning: the Brexit and the Donald Trump phenomenon in the US seemed highly analogous in some relevant (but never defined) way. It didn't help that Trump was in Scotland, busily making that same connection himself.

But what are the connections? The Trump vote is anchored by a visible cohort of working-class whites who are principally driven by racial animus. Upon their complaints are draped (by themselves and, compliantly, the media) the more decorous claims of economic hardship, but this is an evident dodge. Hillary far outperforms Trump among those earning less than $50,000 (53% - 36%). She outperforms him in nearly every region of the country: North East (+22%), Midwest (+11%), and West (+12%). She trails only in the South (-12%), where those white voters have a certain distinctive cultural and historical context. In that that specific historical and cultural context--slavery, civil war, Jim Crow, and the post-civil-rights era GOP realignment--we see the grievances of a large chunk of the Trump bloc. 

How to connect that to an apple grower in Herefordshire? It is part of the American experience to see the grievances of American whites through the lens of race--so much so that we can't see that the immigrant that angers the Herefordshire orchardist is a white guy from Poland. Poles are the stand-in in the British narrative for the invading "other."  It's so hard for Americans not to see this in racial terms, because for Americans everything is racial, but this is where the phenomena of Trump and the Brexit most obviously diverge. 

The British don't share the history of the Alabaman. As recently as a century ago, they controlled the most powerful empire since the Romans. They ruled it from off the shore of Europe, a separation that figures hugely in their self-conception. Those on the other side of the English Channel were the others, the ones who came from time to time in boats (and later, planes) as would-be conquerors. Their otherness, of course, was not predicated on race, but nationality, place, culture, religion (sometimes), and blood. 

Old rural English people scared of immigrants voted to leave the EU and old rural American people scared of immigrants vote for Trump. They're the same. They're not. Nor are the immigrants. The flavors of xenophobia are varied, and never interchangeable. 

The fixation on connecting Trump and the Brexit would be harmless enough if it were constrained to election predictions. But if Trump does win in November and we have delved no deeper into the causes of that victory than to say they were the same as those who voted to leave the EU, we will have failed to understand the actual forces at work. The UK and US have very different pasts, different histories, different wounds, and different cultures. We are motivated not by amorphous, global grievances, but the very specific ones that create the world we see around us.

Everything's Bad for Hillary

I'm noticing a pattern--or think I am. If I'm right, it must hint at ... something. It goes like this. Something happens in the news. The 24-hour political press spends the next 24-48 hours guessing how they think it will affect the presidential race. (To be fair, they also devote between one and three percent of their coverage to the actual news itself.) In nearly every case, they start from the presumption that it's bad for Hillary. Usually they think it's good for Trump, but bad for Hillary?--natch. After that initial period wears off and they have some data to go with, they forget about that initial presumption and start discussing what's actually going on. 

 

Dunno what to make of it. But we do know, definitively, that this latest mass shooting will benefit Trump and that any concomitant gun debate will be terrible for Hillary. Thank god someone figured that out for us.

In other news, Gallup has two tracking polls out today. They record approvals for...

Obama (a Dem) 53% approve, 44% disapprove (+9)
Congress (controlled by the GOP):  16% approve, 80% disapprove (-64%)

This must of course be more terrible news for Hillary.

Trump in June

Tonight the final votes are cast by Dems, and Hillary becomes the official presumptive nominee. And already, it looks like Donald Trump is a dead man walking. So, for the record: I predict Trump is going to lose in such a spectacular fashion that it will be at the very least historic. It may actually be much worse than that--there's now more than a marginal chance that it splinters the GOP. I expect Trump to be so bad that there's even a nontrivial chance either of a contested convention (10%) or that he drops out before the election (maybe 1-3%).

He's basically not running a presidential campaign, he's even more unstable than I expected, and his naked racism is forcing party members--who recently endorsed him!--to distance themselves or even condemn him. Many Republicans have quietly decided not to go the convention. He's got serious legal issues, he doesn't plan to release his taxes (there's decent circumstantial evidence he's not a billionaire), and he's at open war with the press ("you're a sleaze!").

At the moment, he benefits from a very high floor of support any Republican candidate would receive (~45%), and until recently it was impossible to imagine that baseline support collapsing. But if party insiders start jumping ship, the media continues to hammer him, he continues to get more erratic and unhinged, and polls start moving against him (all completely plausible), that floor will collapse. No one wants to back a hysterical loser--especially pols whose livelihood depend on these things--and there's a tipping point where everyone jumps at once. If it starts happening very soon, then those doomsday possibilities--a contested election, Trump bailing--become more and more likely. 

I'm calling it: Trump is not only done, he's the Titanic and the only question is how many people get off the boat before it sinks.

The Demographics Say Trump Won't Win

While watching this stinker of a basketball game (the Thunder are crushing the hapless Dubs), I started thinking about, what else?--presidential politics. Recently, there's been a bunch of talk about polls tightening, which in turn leads people to wonder if Trump actually has a shot at winning the election. In my weaker moments, those polls seem to blot out the light for me, too--until I remember that politics is basically demographics.

If you look at the past four elections, there is very little variation in the voting blocs. Dems have won a minimum of 88% of the black vote. Except for 2004, they've won around two-thirds of the Latino vote.Republicans have won between 55% and 59% of whites in each election. Given that this is going to be potentially even more racially charged than previous elections, expect the trends to grow. My back-of-the-envelope calcs tell me Hillary should get something like six million more votes than Trump in the popular vote.

The presidential election actually happens at the state level, and here the math is even harder for Trump. If you look at all the states that have voted Dem in the last four elections (two won by Dems, two by GOP), Hillary starts at 242 of the 270 needed to win. There are ten states that have split their vote in that time, and Hillary can win by picking up just two or three of those. She could win it with the 242 and Florida alone. (And 35% of Florida is black and Latino.)

Trump's Misstep? [Updated]

I can't miss  an opportunity to comment on Trumps's latest shenanigans--not when he says something like this: Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." (It was a press release; he hasn't--yet--started speaking in the third-person.)

I've been bullish on Trump's chances since the first debate, but I'm pretty sure this is the end of his bid for the nomination. For these reasons:

1. He doesn't actually have enough support to win now; he needs to convince backers of other candidates as the primary goes on.
2. While hardcore supporters won't abandon him, this is a disqualifying statement in the vein of Carson's pyramid granaries. Voters (and humans in general) constantly measure candidates not only against their own criteria, but against the perceived judgment of the population. It happens in social groups of all kinds. In politics, candidates sometimes get upgraded because of this psychological assessment (Obama in '08), but more often they get downgraded. Think Perry with his "oops" moment, Cain with the "Uzbeki-becki-stan-stan" comment, and Carson this year. I think it manifests as private embarrassment and a wish to dissociate yourself from someone who seems so absurd to the majority. When it happens, marking yourself as a backer threatens *your own* social standing, a risk non-hardcore voters will eschew. (In other words, think high school.)


3. There is another candidate (or two) who basically believe the same things Trump does, but who will be disciplined enough not to issue a disqualifying/ embarrassing statement. I'm thinking Cruz mainly, but Rubio would do in a pinch. If there were only a Jeb as the alternative, it might be different.

Prediction: Trump will spend the next week trying to muscle through near-universal national and international condemnation, probably doubling down along the way. Critically, though, the GOP has finally found an attack point, and they will go after him mercilessly. In next week's debate (Dec 15), this issue will suffuse everything, and the other candidates will begin to emerge as plausible alternatives for Trump voters. His popularity, already stalled, will slowly erode on the way to Iowa--which was always going to be a tough win for a non-evangelical like Trump.
So like Carson, he'll just slowly fade away. Unlike Carson, he will not go quietly.

Update, Dec 9.
Hmmm, this would seem to undermine my thesis a mite:

Bloomberg Politics Poll: Nearly Two-thirds of  Likely GOP Primary Voters Support Trump's Muslim Ban

Almost two-thirds of likely 2016 Republican primary voters favor Donald Trump's call to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the U.S., while more than a third say it makes them more likely to vote for him.

Probably for reasons of pride, I'm not ready to completely back off my prediction of Trump's demise, but this is powerful evidence that his support is real, racist, and in all likelihood long-lasting.