A Sense of Doubt blog post #3548 - Stop Trump from "governing" and a song for Music Monday 2411.04
I have been working on this post for sometime, gathering materials, and I have some other posts with more materials in them (such as tomorrow's).
because it does...
The four things Trump does not like according to Bob Woodward
Democracy
Yet most of Mr. Trump’s top advisers have urged the campaign and the candidate to focus on the economy, immigration and crime — issues on which Mr. Trump’s message resonates powerfully with the so-called persuadable voters they are targeting.
from - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/10/us/politics/trump-campaign-election.html
But Trump cannot stay on message. He slings vitriol, sows hate and division, talks about plotting his revenge, refers to those who oppose him as "the enemy within," and wants to turn the military on citizens who are peacefully protesting or just disagreeing with him in a public forum.
https://brane-space.blogspot.com/2024/10/spare-me-reepo-outrage-media-hype-over.html
"Americans from both sides of the political spectrum should be alarmed by Trump’s words and behavior. The nation must confront the fact that beyond his hateful character, he is crippled cognitively and showing clear signs of mental illness. There’s no need to resort to armchair psychology to interpret what’s apparent. " - Las Vegas Sun Editorial
PLEASE...
vote!!
SOME VIDEOS
"I'm the Father of IVF."
The Daily Show - Desi Lydic
TRUMP IS A DESPOT
Brian Tyler Cohen
In his own words
“2024 is the final battle,” Donald Trump has said.
“Either they win or we win. And if they win, we no longer have a country,” he has argued.
“Our country,” he has said, “is going to hell.”
As he campaigns to reclaim the presidency, Trump has intensified his rhetoric of cataclysm and apocalypse, beyond even the tenor of his previous two campaigns. He has claimed that “the blood-soaked streets of our once great cities are cesspools of violent crimes” and that Americans are living in “the most dangerous time in the history of our country.”
More specifically, he has promised to use the powers of the federal government to punish people he perceives to be his critics and opponents, including the Biden family, district attorneys, journalists and “the deep state.” He has suggested that Mark Milley, a retired top general, deserves the death penalty. Trump has called President Biden “an enemy of the state” and Nancy Pelosi “the Wicked Witch.” He has accused former President Barack Obama — “Barack Hussein Obama,” in Trump’s telling — of directing Biden to admit “terrorists and terrorist sympathizers” into the U.S.
Trump’s threats, often justified with lies, are deeply alarming, historians and legal experts say. He has repeatedly promised to undermine core parts of American democracy. He has also signaled that, unlike in his first term in the White House, he will avoid appointing aides and cabinet officials who would restrain him.
Many Americans have heard only snippets of Trump’s promises. He tends to make them on Truth Social, his niche social media platform, or at campaign events, which have received less media coverage than they did when he first ran for president eight years ago. Yet there is reason to believe that Trump means what he says.
“He’s told us what he will do,” Liz Cheney, a member of Congress until her criticism of Trump led to her defeat in a Republican primary, told John Dickerson of CBS News this past weekend. “People who say, ‘Well, if he’s elected, it’s not that dangerous because we have all of these checks and balances’ don’t fully understand the extent to which the Republicans in Congress today have been co-opted.”
Not simply policy
I understand why many Americans would like to tune out — or deny — the risks facing our democracy. I also understand why many voters are frustrated with the status quo and find Trump’s anti-establishment campaign appealing.
Incomes, wealth and life expectancy have been stagnant for decades for millions of people. The Covid pandemic and its aftermath contributed to a rise in both inflation and societal disorder. School absenteeism has risen sharply. The murder rate and homelessness have both increased. Undocumented immigration has soared during Biden’s presidency.
But it’s worth being clear about what Trump is promising to do. He isn’t merely calling for policy solutions that some Americans support and others oppose. He is promising to undo foundations of American democracy and to rule as authoritarians in other countries have. He is also leading the race for the Republican nomination by a wide margin, and running even with, or slightly ahead of, Biden in general election polls.
Today’s newsletter is the first of several in coming months meant to help you understand what a second Trump presidency would look like. For starters, I recommend that you read what Trump is saying in his own words. My colleagues Ian Prasad Philbrick and Lyna Bentahar have been tracking his campaign appearances and social media posts, and have compiled a list of his most extreme statements.
I also recommend an ongoing series of Times stories by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman, which previews a potential second Trump presidency. Among the subjects: legal policy, immigration and the firing of career government employees. The most recent story looks at why he is more likely to achieve his aims in a second term than he was in his first.
“So many of the guardrails that existed to stop him are gone or severely weakened,” Maggie told me. “That includes everything from internal appointees to a changed Congress, where he has outlasted his few Republican critics there.”
What democracy needs
The new issue of The Atlantic magazine is devoted to this subject as well, with 24 writers imagining a second Trump term. “Our concern with Trump is not that he is a Republican, or that he embraces — when convenient — certain conservative ideas,” Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, writes. “We believe that a democracy needs, among other things, a strong liberal party and a strong conservative party in order to flourish.” The problem, Goldberg explains, is that Trump is “an antidemocratic demagogue.”
Regular readers of this newsletter know that I agree with Goldberg about the value of both conservative and liberal ideas, and that I find it uncomfortable to write about the likely nominee of a major party in such harsh terms. In 2024, we will also cover Biden’s record and campaign with appropriate skepticism.
But it would be wishful thinking to portray Trump as anything other than antidemocratic. He keeps telling the country what he intends to do if he returns to the White House in 2025. It’s worth listening.
Related: “The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War,” Robert Kagan, a conservative who has advised both Republicans and Democrats, warns in The Washington Post.
FROM THE MORNING NYTIMES JULY 25 2024
Good morning. We’re covering a significant economic change and its effect on American politics — plus Biden’s speech, Kamala Harris and lab-grown meat.
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| A Trump rally in Michigan. Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times |
Falling behind
A common theory about Donald Trump’s appeal is that working-class white people feel they fell behind as other groups pulled ahead. He recognized the sentiment and spoke to those voters’ concerns.
It turns out that those concerns are grounded in real economic changes, a new study from Harvard researchers shows. The researchers analyzed census and tax records covering 57 million children to look at people’s ability to rise to the middle and upper classes — their mobility — over two recent generations. They found that it had improved among Black people and deteriorated among poor white people, as this chart by my colleague Ashley Wu shows:
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| Source: Opportunity Insights | By The New York Times |
The study’s full findings are nuanced, as Ashley and I explain in a story that The Times published today. Black people still, on average, make less money than white people, and the overall income gap remains large. But Black Americans who were born poor have gained ground while their white counterparts have lost some, narrowing the longstanding gap. That shift can help explain why some voters’ attitudes have changed over the past couple of decades.
Cutting in line
After Trump won in 2016, many journalists — myself included — turned to the sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s book on the American right, “Strangers in Their Own Land,” to try to understand what had happened. Hochschild provided a helpful analogy, one that resonates with the Harvard study’s findings.
It goes something like this: White working-class people in red states saw the American dream as a queue moving people to prosperity. Over the past several decades, thanks to globalization and other changes, the queue stopped moving. And other groups have moved to the front of the queue. As a result, working-class white Americans often believe that their shrinking mobility is the result not just of outside forces like globalization but also of other groups that supposedly cut ahead.
The Harvard study suggests that white working-class conservatives were right when they felt their own mobility had slowed, or even reversed, compared with that of Black Americans. (The researchers did not find significant changes for other racial groups.) The study also found that white people born into high-income families have seen their mobility improve — meaning the drop in mobility is restricted to the white working class.
Trump has benefited from that reality. He has tapped into the resentment many white voters feel toward people of other races with his inflammatory and at times racist rhetoric, such as when he suggested Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. He has also criticized rich elites — which includes people who gained mobility as the working class lost out. As a result, some working-class white voters flipped from the Democratic Party to Trump between 2012 and 2016. Trump continues to have strong support from those voters, polls show.
Of course, the evidence does not justify racial resentment. Economists say the queue analogy doesn’t reflect how the economy actually works. A growing, healthy economy creates more queues to prosperity; it’s not zero-sum, as the analogy suggests. In fact, the Harvard study found that white mobility had diminished least in the places where Black mobility had improved most.
And while Black mobility has improved, it has not improved anywhere near enough to eliminate wide racial gaps between Black and white people. Gaps have narrowed, not closed.
Still, Trump has tapped into many white voters’ fears that they have been left behind while other lawmakers, particularly Democrats, have focused on policies that help minority groups. The Harvard study helps show why Trump has been able to do that.
Insights for both sides
The new research can also help explain changes among Black voters. They have slightly shifted toward Trump since 2020, polls show. One possible explanation is that some Black voters’ economic gains have allowed them to focus more on noneconomic issues — such as abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. rights — on which they are more conservative than typical Democrats.
Experts not involved with the study said that it would reverberate across the political spectrum. “The left and the right have very different views on race and class,” Ralph Richard Banks, a law professor at Stanford, told me. “The value of the study is that it brings some unimpeachable evidence to bear on these questions.”
For more
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At another point, Trump defended his opposition to a bipartisan bill to add emergency border authorities and funding, which Harris said he had blocked to deprive the administration of a politically beneficial accomplishment. Trump argued the legislation was unnecessary because Biden and Harris “could have just said, ‘CLOSE THE BORDER!’ like I did.” Illegal border crossings fell last month to the lowest level in four years, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs part of reforming the immigration system, Harris suggested creating “an earned pathway to citizenship,” a goal discussed in both parties for decades. Trump responded, “SAY GOODBYE TO THE U.S.A.! SHE IS A RADICAL MARXIST!”
During the 2020 election season, despite outbreaks of street violence, most voters saw protests against police brutality as peaceful, legitimate political activity, rejecting Trump’s effort to smear them in threatening terms. In the 2022 midterms, many prominent GOP election deniers lost, and fears for democracy were a key motivator for voters.
Story continues below advertisementIt remains underappreciated, but our national response to the antidemocratic menace of the Trump years has in some respects been surprisingly good — not just electorally but also institutionally. Trump’s gaming of the judicial system to overturn his 2020 loss hit a wall in the courts. By a wide bipartisan margin, Congress passed reforms to Trump-proof the system by which we count electoral votes.
While promoting her new book “Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning,” the former Wyoming congresswoman — who was defeated by a Trump loyalist last year — is warning that Trump could transform America’s democracy into a dictatorship if he is reelected; anticipating, she said, that he would attempt to stay longer than his term.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/12/04/trump-jan-6-fringe-theories/
Now Trump is also suggesting that the government is withholding information on people known as “Fence Cutter Bulwark” and “Scaffold Commander” — nicknames given by conspiracy theorists to people they claim are government agents who instigated the Jan. 6 riot. Trump asked for “all documents regarding” Ray Epps, a supporter of the former president who has been falsely accused of being an undercover operative, and John Nichols, a liberal journalist in Wisconsin who right-wing media have suggested encouraged violence at the Capitol on behalf of the “deep state.” He also asked for any intelligence the government had on “Antifa,” on pipe bombs found near the Capitol on Jan. 6, and on “informants, cooperators [and] undercover agents … involved in the assistance, planning, or encouragement” of the events of that day.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/trump-tells-christian-supporters-you-wont-have-to-vote-anymore/
Trump: “Get out and vote just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years it will be fixed. It'll be fine. You won't have to vote anymore...In four years you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good your not gonna have to vote.” pic.twitter.com/Ig91KpOeCl
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) July 27, 2024
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/article/2024/jul/25/donald-trump-hannibal-lecter
Trump thinks Hannibal Lecter is a real person
Donald Trump’s odd phrasing when he mentions Lecter has baffled some, not least because it’s never made explicitly clear whether Trump thinks that Lecter is alive or not. The repeated use of the line “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” seems to suggest he might be unable to discern fiction from reality. To make matters worse, Hannibal Lecter isn’t actually dead. He remained alive through all the Silence of the Lambs prequels, and basically won in Hannibal, and even though the final episode of the Hannibal TV show ended with Lecter toppling off a cliff into the sea, his fate was left deliberately vague. But he can’t think Lecter is real, because once he mentioned that he was a character from a movie. So what is it?
Why Donald Trump’s Plan to Stop Taxing Tips Is a Lame Political Stunt
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/donald-trump-proposal-no-tax-tips/
But the proposal, if it were ever implemented, could have a detrimental effect on most tipped workers. The primary beneficiaries would be people who own and operate hotels, restaurants, and other businesses that employ tipped workers—in other words, people like Trump.
First, many people who rely on tips earn so little money that they already pay no federal income taxes. For example, half of all servers earn $32,000 or less. A server with a family who earns $32,000 does not owe any federal income tax and, therefore, would not benefit at all from Trump’s proposal.
The bigger issue is that the federal minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 an hour. The tipped minimum wage has not increased since 1991. Combined with tips, these workers are supposed to earn a minimum of $7.25 an hour. That is not close to a living wage in the United States in 2024.
Trump’s New Silicon Valley Supporters Really Want You to Forget He Called Nazis ‘Fine People’
While Trump did condemn the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who took part in the rally, those who covered the event have repeatedly pointed out that only extremists were involved in the march, including members of the so-called alt-right, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and far-right militias. Trump’s “fine people” comments were at best misleading and at worst tacit support for extremists, despite his subsequent disavowal. Trump has consistently been slammed by critics for his comments, but false claims from Trump supporters have persisted. They resurfaced earlier this year when Snopes published a fact check titled “No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People.’” Snopes later added an editor’s note, clarifying that those covering the rally said it was “conceived of, led by, and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump's characterization was wrong.”
But over the past few weeks, Trump’s supporters in Silicon Valley and Wall Street—some of whom began officially supporting the former president following his assassination attempt last month—have also tried to rewrite history.
(Again, while Trump did condemn neo-Nazis and white supremacists, he also said there were “fine people” among those at the rally, where the crowd was made up only of extremists.)
Musk also shared a post from Mark Pincus, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur best known as the founder of mobile gaming giant Zynga. Pincus, who has said he has yet to decide on which candidate he will vote for, wrote on X last week: “This is the best example of how we have all been manipulated by MSM.” Pincus was quoting the June post from Maguire. Musk responded: “Yup.”
Pincus’ post was shared by Musk as well as David Sacks, an influential tech investor who is closely allied with the X owner. Musk’s different posts on the topic have been cumulatively viewed almost 80 million times.
Another Musk ally, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, was among the very first to publicly endorse Trump in the hours after the shooting. Last week, he shared a post from anti-LGBTQ hate account Libs of TikTok to his 1.4 million followers that claimed “Biden and Kamala both lied and spread the ‘very fine people’ hoax again this week. It’s easily debunked by watching the full video. This is the video they don’t want you to see.”
The suggestion that the full, unedited video of Trump’s comments has somehow been scrubbed from the internet over the past seven years is central to many of the claims being made in the past week—even though the video is widely available on any number of platforms.
MAGA Election Deniers Are Going All Out to Rig Georgia for Trump
The right-wing majority on the state election board passed a new rule this week that could embolden counties not to certify elections if Democrats win.
Even Republicans who have denounced Trump are doing the bidding of election deniers in the state. In late July, the secretary of state’s office unveiled a new online portal that allows someone to cancel the registration of another voter online if they have allegedly died or moved out of state. Users only need to know a voter’s name, date of birth, and county residence to initiate a cancellation request, and the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number or their driver’s license number in order to finalize a cancellation. That very information leaked online after the portal’s rollout, exacerbating concerns about voter privacy. Georgia Senate Democrats said the site “empowers conspiracy theorists and other bad actors to deny Georgians the right to vote.”
The portal is particularly worrisome because SB202 explicitly green-lit unlimited challenges to voter eligibility and right-wing activists challenged the registrations of roughly 100,000 people during the 2022 midterms. The Georgia legislature made it even easier to launch mass voter challenges this year, sparking fears that more voters could be wrongly removed from voter rolls. ProPublica reported that there have already been attempts to cancel the registrations of Raffensperger and far-right GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene using the new online tool.
Georgia is once again a toss-up state, as the latest projections show Kamala Harris pulling even with Trump. But the election deniers who have been empowered after 2020 are doing everything they can to rig the rules to prevent a Democrat from winning the state again.
Trump May Demonize Migration From Venezuela, But He Helped Fuel It
How the once-richest nation in South America suffered the biggest non-war economic collapse in modern history.
On July 28, millions of Venezuelans went to the polls to vote in the country’s highly anticipated presidential election. For the first time in years, there was hope that the opposition would unseat the long-ruling antidemocratic leader Nicolás Maduro and restore a sense of future post-Chavismo—late President Hugo Chávez’s populist political project of a “socialist revolution” that has slid into authoritarianism—to a once-prosperous nation wrecked by prolonged economic collapse, political repression, and a massive exodus of people that has had repercussions across the region.
But in the wake of the vote came terror. The electoral authority—controlled by a pro-government majority—declared Maduro, the political successor of Chávez, the winner, despite questions about the integrity of the process. The opposition disputed Maduro’s claim with evidence that their candidate, little-known former diplomat Edmundo González, had won by a wide margin. (The United States government agreed.) The Carter Center, which sent an expert group to Venezuela to observe the election, said it “did not meet international standards” and couldn’t “be considered democratic.”
For some observers, the path forward is a transition to democracy that allows for the normalization of relations with other countries and economic recovery—without sanctions. There have been some fragile signs of improvement. Inflation, while still high, was down to 190 percent last year and Venezuela’s oil exports increased by 12 percent. Luis Oliveros, an economist at the Universidade Metropolitana in Caracas told El Pais that oil production can continue to increase if sanctions stay flexible.
But uncertainty remains as Maduro tightens his grip on power despite the will of voters, blaming the unrest on “North American imperialism and the criminal fascists” and saying he wouldn’t “hesitate to summon the people to a revolution.” Rodríguez at the University of Denver sees one possible scenario where the pariah Maduro regime collapses in the face of mass protests. But more likely, he says, the “viable way out to avoid the consolidation of a full-fledged autocracy” is through a power-sharing agreement. Meanwhile, the US government has reportedly discussed extending Maduro a pardon offer to convince him to step down.
“The polls showing that large numbers of Venezuelans will migrate if Maduro remains in power prove that it isn’t about the economic situation so much as it is about Maduro,” Berg says. “That is to say, it’s about regime type. Without a change in government, Venezuelans will lose hope and migrate. Absolutely nothing changes in Venezuela until Maduro leaves.”
Over the past decade, there’s one truth that liberals have been loath to admit: Donald Trump is funny. This aspect of his appeal prompts far less commentary than his far-right positions, his venality or his mogul’s bravado. But when you watch him at a rally, you can see he’s playing for laughs: jabbing at his opponents, doing crowd work, even being self-deprecating, sort of.
Cicero could write a treatise on Mr. Trump’s use of irony, as he’s proved himself a master of humorous misdirection. Liberals tend to think that irony is a type of wit that is aligned with progressivism. But for nearly a decade now, if you went looking for comedy in American politics, Mr. Trump would have been your best bet for finding it.
Now that magic is gone. Politics is about communication, and when Mr. Trump is on, his humor offers a clear outline of his worldview. These days, he looks lost. The fact that Mr. Trump is less sure-footed as a comedian may be a harbinger of a more significant uncertainty — an inability to land the punchlines because he can no longer identify the right setups.
Mr. Trump, a real-estate tycoon turned reality TV star, came to politics by way of humor. Whether it’s true or not that he decided to run in 2016 in response to President Barack Obama’s roast of him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, there’s no doubt that Mr. Trump’s rise through the Republican ranks was partly thanks to his uncanny insult humor.
Recently, though, you get a sense that the light has gone out. Sure, he’s out there doing his Bob Hope thing, vamping on various topics, bringing out the hits — his weird digressions about Hannibal Lecter; his incoherent rant about sharks; and other favorites that lie squarely on the border between humor and possible cognitive decline — but the electric energy that made him an internet sensation is absent. Gone are the days of armies of trolls creating “God Emperor Trump” memes. Instead, he’s complaining about crowd sizes and attacking reporters for being rude. His abrasiveness no longer comes off as funny; it feels cranky and desperate. A recent post by Mr. Trump on Truth Social — his own social media platform — began, “I’m doing really well in the Presidential Race,” which sounds like whiny protest. It’s a far cry from such Trump Twitter classics as “Happy 4th of July to everyone, even the haters and losers!”
The Trump campaign has attacked Kamala Harris for laughing a lot, mocking her in memes and floating the nickname “Laffin’ Kamala” (easily the worst of Mr. Trump’s monikers for his opponents to date). But the gambit backfired badly, drawing attention to how Mr. Trump himself never seems to laugh, while Tim Walz, Ms. Harris’s running mate, touted Ms. Harris for “bringing back the joy.”
https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2024/11/04/political-scientists-lay-out-how-abortion-views-could-impact-the-vote/
But abortion has proven to be an exception to that rule, now that it’s illegal in many parts of the country. Voters were motivated to change their party support over abortion — unlike any other issue, including inflation — during the 2022 midterm elections, which took place five months after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned federal protections, according to Mutz and co-author Edward Mansfield’s findings.
Their analysis, published earlier this year, shows roughly 60% of vote switchers who thought abortion should be legal shifted their votes away from Republican candidates. About the same percentage shifted their votes toward Republican candidates if they thought abortion should be illegal. Because more Americans favor making abortion legal — about 60% vs. 40%, according to this data — Democrats got a small net boost, with 52% of people shifting toward Democratic candidates, compared with 48% of all vote changers shifting toward Republicans.
Mutz said preliminary data based on early voting this year is showing a similar trend.
“We are not seeing people change votes due to the economy, but we are seeing people change votes — relative to their presidential vote in 2020 — based on abortion,” Mutz said. “Among that small segment of the public that does change, what we see is that it is predicted by changes in attitudes toward the Supreme Court in particular, and by their abortion views.”
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- Days ago: MOM = 3412 days ago & DAD = 068 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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