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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https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/12/04/trump-jan-6-fringe-theories/
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
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/
Trump’s New Silicon Valley Supporters Really Want You to Forget He Called Nazis ‘Fine People’
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.
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.
https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2024/11/04/political-scientists-lay-out-how-abortion-views-could-impact-the-vote/
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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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