Thursday, May 09, 2024
Trump Is Desperate and Dangerous
The first weeks of Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in Manhattan have not gone well for the former president. Key prosecution witnesses such as former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, attorney Keith Davidson and onetime White House aide Hope Hicks have painted a damning portrait of Trump's plot to hide embarrassing information from the public, with the evident goal of impacting the 2016 election. At this point, it would require some arcane or technical point of law or jury nullification (thanks, perhaps to one or more MAGA-friendly jurors) to save him from being convicted.
In response, Trump and his various spokespeople and agents are trying to find new ways to make their hyperbolic messages to the MAGA faithful ever more extreme and graphic. The goal of such a propaganda strategy is to manipulate fear and other negative emotions in order to tie Trump’s followers even more closely to him, in what is already a cult-like relationship.
In this dynamic, Trump’s feelings of peril are shared by his die-hard followers. By implication, those negative feelings can encourage or legitimate violence as the natural and reasonable response to a (nonexistent) existential threat. Of course, it is only Trump who is in personal jeopardy because of his reckless and unprincipled behavior, not his millions of followers.
In a recent commentary for Salon, I described Trump’s horror-movie strategy as: a relentless onslaught designed to create fear and terror about a doomed and ruined America that is being destroyed from within by “vermin,” i.e., the Democrats, liberals, nonwhite people, Muslims, George Soros, the Deep State, “woke,” “Black Lives Matter,” Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, those who are not white Christians, the evil “news media” [and other] nebulous forces [who aim] to turn the country into a Stalinist-Maoist-Communist hellhole . . . where the MAGA people, "real Americans” (meaning white people) and their Dear Leader Trump will be imprisoned.
Even by these standards, Trump’s most recent fundraising emails are ghoulish. Last week, Trump told his followers that his “enemies,” such as the “corrupt judges” leading the “witch hunt” against him, literally want to “cut out” his tongue. . . .
Trump has not in fact been convicted of anything, to this point. But amplifying and repeating the purported threat is a key element of a successful propaganda or disinformation campaign. Trump and his messengers are connecting “Doomsday,” “the death of MAGA” and grotesque images of torture to trigger the fear centers of the brain. Social psychologists and other scientific experts have repeatedly found that the brain structures and thought processes of conservative-authoritarians are focused on and aroused by fear and negative thoughts. Other research has shown that such people are also more vulnerable to death anxiety than are liberals and moderates.
Cognitive linguist and philosopher George Lakoff has proposed that the divergent political personalities of conservatives and liberals are deeply rooted in family structure, parenting and perceptions of morality and the common good. . . . "the progressive worldview is modeled on a nurturant parent family" and the assumption "that the world is basically good and can be made better and that one must work toward that". . .
Conservatives, on the other hand, follow a "strict father model," in Lakoff's view, rooted in an assumption "that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good": The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline — physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline.
The MAGAverse and TrumpWorld are still fueled by a profound fear of Barack Obama, as bizarre as that may seem to those outside their worldview. For Trumpists and others on the American or global far right, Obama appears as the human and symbolic embodiment of everything they despise about multiracial pluralistic democracy, and the "elites" they perceive as controlling it.
[I]n the real world, President Biden has if anything been overly patient and generous with those who support Trump and the MAGA movement, and has tried to reach out to them repeatedly in a (mostly failed) attempt to find common ground.
Trump’s horror politics may seem like a new and profoundly disturbing twist, but in fact the American right spent decades preparing the political battlefield, emotionally conditioning and training its public to be respond to false narratives of fear, terror, death and destruction. While the initial goal may not have explicitly been to end pluralistic, multiracial democracy and replace it with a white supremacist pseudo-democracy or "managed democracy," that possibility was always present. Trump, the MAGA movement and their gangster-capitalist allies are taking advantage of the fact that tens of millions of Americans — mostly but not entirely white Americans — have been primed for authoritarian “leadership.”
But Trump and his allies now have a crucial fork in the road. Trump’s criminal trials — and his resulting personal jeopardy — will only get worse for the foreseeable future, and the 2024 presidential election is now less than six months away. Time is running out, and their messaging of terror, doom and dread seems increasingly unregulated. If they frighten their own supporters too badly, they may become numb and assume all is lost. Conversely, dialing down the existential terror risks dampening the enthusiasm of the MAGA faithful
The solution is for Donald Trump and his agents to create an optimal level of constant discomfort and fear that they can trigger in some sort of crescendo in the weeks and days before Election Day.
But we shouldn't underestimate Donald Trump's ability to leverage negative emotions to serve his purposes. As others have observed, the worse things get in America, the better it is for Trump's campaign to seize dictatorial power and smother American's multiracial pluralistic democracy. If we lived in a healthy society, things clearly wouldn't work that way. But we do not. Thus, the perverse incentive(s) and moral hazard driving Donald Trump and the American right-wing’s decades of horror politics and their collective attempts to create a living nightmare for the American people.
Wednesday, May 08, 2024
Tuesday, May 07, 2024
Monday, May 06, 2024
Sunday, May 05, 2024
Trump's Frightening Time Magazine Interview
How catastrophic would a second Trump presidency be? Worse than you think. Worse, even, than I had feared — before I read his recent Time magazine interview in which Donald Trump lays out his plans. They are, in a word, insane.
Imagine the National Guard, perhaps aided by active-duty military units, fanning out across the country to round up and deport all undocumented migrants, believed to number roughly 11 million. Imagine these men, women and children being held pending deportation in vast detention camps.
That’s what Trump told Time he would do.
Imagine the National Guard also being sent into cities to fight crime, whether or not governors request such assistance. When Time correspondent Eric Cortellessa noted that violent crime is declining across the country — homicides fell by 13 percent last year, according to the FBI — Trump insisted, without evidence, that the data is rigged. “It’s a lie,” he claimed.
Think about what our lives would be like if Trump even tries to do those two things. This is not the kind of country where troops in military gear set up highway checkpoints and raid residential neighborhoods, demanding to see everyone’s papers. This is not a country where camo-clad soldiers patrol shopping malls and nightlife districts. Not yet, that is.
Do you like the rule of law? If so, you probably won’t like Trump’s pledge that “yes, absolutely” he would consider pardoning all the defendants charged with or convicted of crimes stemming from participation in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. “I call them the J-6 patriots,” he told Time.
Those “patriots” smashed through police lines and into the seat of U.S. democracy, injuring 140 officers and forcing members of Congress first to cower in fear for their lives and then to flee the building. . . . Trump, meanwhile, sat passively in the White House for hours and watched all of this unfold on television. Now, since the insurrectionists believed Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, he would consider absolving them all of any wrongdoing.
In fact, upholding the “big lie” appears to be a prerequisite for serving in a second Trump administration. . . . That means Trump would not be constrained by “mature adults” like those who served in some key White House posts during his first term. The non-MAGA Republican establishment has been vanquished and obliterated. Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, runs the Republican National Committee alongside another stolen-election Trump loyalist. GOP-aligned think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, have fallen in line and are developing detailed plans for shrinking the federal workforce and forcing what’s left of it to bend to Trump’s imperial will.
Having created the Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, Trump said that as president he would stick to his latest campaign position, which is trying to have the abortion issue both ways: He says the question is now entirely up to the states, but he refuses to say whether he would veto federal abortion restrictions if they reached his desk.
On foreign affairs, Trump reiterated his threat not to honor our commitment to defend a NATO ally that does not, in his opinion, spend enough on collective defense.
Europe actually gives about as much aid to Ukraine as the United States does, but who cares about facts? Judging by Trump’s record, his election would be calamitous for the freedom fighters of Ukraine — and also for the Palestinians, since Trump told Time that a two-state solution, the long-standing goal of U.S. policy, “is going to be very, very tough.”
Think about all of this when you decide whether and how to vote in November. Read the interview. And don’t say Trump didn’t warn us.
A Cautionary Tale for Those Who Dislike the Biden Economy
You’re unhappy with this economy? OK, that’s your right. But you should seriously consider whether you want the available alternative.
Last November, I wrote what I thought was a modest commentary about how the Biden economy was doing remarkably well, at least by most standard macroeconomic measures, and much of the corporate media wasn’t reporting about it. Job numbers were historically high, unemployment low and the U.S. had done the best of all G-7 economies in bringing down inflation resulting from the worst pandemic years.
I was careful to note that my wife and I, and members of our daughters’ generation, were still feeling economic pain around the cost of food and housing, and that many younger people felt they could not get their lives started due to student debt and high housing prices.
I got considerable grief from readers for that one, but I stand by what I wrote about the Biden administration’s active economic moves and a renewed focus on industrial policy to accomplish goals that simply cannot be left to “the marketplace.” Leaving infrastructure work to the marketplace is how America wound up with so many embarrassing airports, shaky bridges and poky, increasingly dangerous trains. There are things we must do together.
As I wrote at the time, Biden’s manufacturing plan invests in rural areas and will transform local economies:
He’s the first president in many decades to stand with organized labor and support its fight for better wages and benefits. He continues to work on alleviating the crushing student debt that limits so many young adults’ lives. He has taken on Big Pharma, moving to lower prescription drug prices and health care costs for older Americans. He is working to stop the junk fees hidden in so many transactions. He rejoined the Paris climate accords and has done far more to address that crisis than any previous president.
The general economic news has only improved since then, including strong jobs numbers for March and April. As Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg writes, the U.S economy typically does much better when a Democrat is in the White House.
Although inflation for consumer goods rose slightly in March, which is not good news for anyone, the Federal Reserve has done a good job in carefully bringing inflation down after the supply-chain disruptions and supermarket price hikes of the pandemic. Remember the corporate media braying endlessly about the coming recession? Well, it never came.
So here we are: The macroeconomic indicators look great, but your household budget may remain a struggle. Gas prices keep rising, but that's largely the result of decisions made in Saudi Arabia and Russia, well beyond the Biden administration’s control.
But here’s what I wasn’t thinking about enough when I wrote that earlier commentary: People in this country are kept unsettled and economically stressed by living with a threadbare social safety net, one relentlessly under attack by Republicans. When you’re living paycheck to paycheck, as a frightening number of Americans do, there is no room for higher food, housing or fuel costs. Long before either Biden or Trump occupied the White House, living costs were rapidly outpacing rising incomes.
The economic benefits of the massive Infrastructure Bill and the strategic CHIPS Act are just now beginning to be realized, with much of the funding specifically targeted to help create jobs in rural areas of so-called red states. (The White House has an interactive map explaining all the efforts across the country.)
Those economic benefits are twofold: the immediate well-paying jobs and then, down the line, the new or rebuilt roads, bridges, airports, public transit, waterway infrastructure, broadband internet and microchip factories that will serve us for decades.
Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, one of the unsung heroes of the Biden team, is working to keep monopolistic companies from harming consumers and workers through price-fixing schemes, non-compete agreements and other underhanded tactics. If you didn’t catch Khan on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart recently, it's well worth your time.
Khan does an outstanding job of taking apart Republicans’ insincere claims about fixing the economy and supporting the working class when she explains how complex the task of protecting workers and consumers is, and how badly the FTC is outgunned by the big corporations aligned with Republicans.
So, as everybody knows — to borrow Trump’s favorite rhetorical device — the notion that Republicans do better with the economy is a worthless statement clause, one might say, in the GOP’s continuing contract on America, one that has duped people for decades by merely employing the propagandist’s trick of repetition.
But since we have more or less been promised an authoritarian economy if Trump prevails in this fall’s election, how well do those work?
Not too well, especially if we’re talking about authoritarian governments that were formerly democracies. Such economies tend to be heavily based on one or two commodities, as with Russia, whose main exports are petroleum and, I’m pretty sure, corruption. Authoritarian governments tend to manage their economies about as poorly as Republicans have in the modern era, which makes perfect sense when you consider that Republicans are not moved by expertise or evidence but by ideology, such as the thoroughly discredited idea that tax cuts for the wealthy will somehow “trickle down” to benefit the average Jane and Joe. And Republicans' fallback argument that they are better with the annual deficit or the national debt is just silly. They have made both things dramatically worse, and mostly decry the national debt so they can further slash the social safety net.
Over the decades, Donald Trump has drummed into his fans’ minds the idea that he is a great businessman. By all accounts — and from every shred of evidence we have seen over the past four decades — he’s anything but. He is certainly a profligate money-burner who keeps being propped up by shady foreign banks, shadowy individuals and organizations and billionaire supporters. (Remember how Donald Trump Jr. bragged that the Trump Organization saw a lot of money pouring in from Russia?) He’s so inept at business that even his casino “empire” went under — in no small measure because he used it (as he did the presidency) to enrich himself.
That’s the “strongman” MAGA believers want in charge of the economy? As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte notes, “Trump supporters mistake petulance for strength.”
He appears ready to follow the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which calls for replacing expert civil servants with a legion of loyalist lackeys, ditching climate science, imprisoning or expelling immigrants who are crucial to the economy, cutting taxes further and reducing Social Security and Medicaid benefits, forcing a misogynistic theocracy on a nation founded on the separation of church and state, and turning our back on historical allies around the world. Oh and, first and foremost, getting revenge on all of Trump’s enemies.
Does anyone actually think that living in that kind of country under that kind of leader would make his or her life better?
Trump himself seems aware, after his own fashion, that things have improved greatly under Biden. After all, he has openly wished for the U.S. economy to crash before the November election.
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